Archive for April, 2009
SSL Certificate Validation
Posted by: | CommentsI put up a post this morning regarding SSL certificate request validation over on the Third Tier web site. If you’ve been wondering how SSL certificates work in SBS 2008 or if you’re about to renew an SSL certificate on an SBS 2003 box, you might want to check out that post.
Troubleshooting Tale: Remote Access Loss on Server
Posted by: | CommentsYou can almost always count on interesting things happening during Update Weekend. Sometimes a patch will yield unexpected results, sometimes you lose access to the server after initiating a restart (and yet the server doesn’t actually restart), and so on. Well, this past weekend was no different, but the types of issues encountered was.
As such, I’m going to start a new series of posts in the vein of demonstrating how troubleshooting was approached during a particular situation to help others identify other possible troubleshooting steps or avenues when encountering problems. We’ll start with a rather typical behavior (restarted a server remotely and could not get access back to the server when it should have come up) that had a very unusual root problem.
Remotely Installing This Month’s ISA Update
Posted by: | CommentsJust a heads-up for those of you who remotely install security updates for your customers. This month includes an update for ISA, and if you don’t know about it beforehand, you could end up in a bit of a jam.
As expected, when installing the ISA update, access to the Internet through the server is interrupted. Unlike some previous updates, however, when the installation of this update completes, Internet access is NOT restored. You don’t get Internet back until you restart the server.
So if you don’t have some mechanism in place for restarting the server automatically after updates install, you could find yourself, and your customer, in a rather unexpected place.
Excel Security Update Applies to Mac Office, Too
Posted by: | CommentsMicrosoft released a couple of updates for their Excel spreadsheet product in the slate of monthly updates for April 2009. The security issues addressed in the update also apply to the Mac version of Excel as well. As such, Microsoft has released updates for both Office 2004 and Office 2008 for the Mac. The files can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx. Because of the nature of the update, all Mac Office users are encouraged to install this update as soon as possible.
Troubleshooting Delayed Message Delivery in Exchange
Posted by: | CommentsAs more and more anti-spam solutions start doing “interesting” things with SMTP and mail delivery, there is an increased chance of users reporting that mail messages to certain domains are delayed. Unlike a full non-delivery report (NDR) which will list the SMTP error codes for easy identification of the reason for the rejection, a delayed delivery report could be the result of an Internet connection issue, spam filter, offline server, or any number of other causes. The remainder of this post details how to track down possible causes for Internet delivery issues. Read More→