It can take long time to restore Exchange databases from backup after a disaster. However, by implementing a recovery strategy called the Messaging Dial Tone, you can make the e-mail service more quickly available to your users, while you restore users' previous data.

The recipe below is implemented successfully on an Exchange 2003 Standard SP2 system with BackupExec as the online backup provider:

Do you wonder if it is possible to implement Active Directory based single sign-on for Nagios ? The answer is yes. Many sysadmins and users would be interested in an integrated environment, where the users are prompted for credentials only once during their initial logon.

You may encounter trouble if you want to deploy your XP image with sysprep on VMWare Server or ESX virtualization platforms. XP out-of-the-box does not support SCSI Controllers used by VMWare. The clue is to obtain the correct versions of drivers plus reconfiguring your sysprep. The recipe below has been implemented successfully on VMWare Server 1.0.5 and ESX 3.5 platforms:

If you need to identify a PC in a unique way for security purposes, you can create a fingerprint consisting of various identification tags of the components in the PC. The Autoit script below returns an MD5 digest for the combination of computer name, chassis id, baseboard id and disk id of drive C:

The Exchange RPC over HTTP feature enables remote users to establish connections across the Internet by tunneling the remote procedure call (RPC) traffic over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).  That way, Your Outlook users will be able to connect directly to an Exchange server in your corporate environment from the Internet.