Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog

  • Spring Connections 2011

    I’ve been attending Connections events for years, mostly since the demise of the late lamented Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC). While MEC was an official Microsoft conference and so benefited from the Microsoft marketing muscle and access to engineers and program managers, it eventually foundered on the twin rocks of a…

  • Beware the effects of enabling an Exchange 2010 archive mailbox

    The introduction of archive mailboxes is one of the major new features offered by Exchange 2010. Matters are substantially improved in Exchange 2010 SP1 as it supports the separation of a user’s primary mailbox and their archive mailbox across different databases, giving administrators the ability to consider schemes such as…

  • Exchange in the Cloud

    I wrote this text as a “web-only chapter” for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out, (also available at Amazon.co.uk and as a Kindle edition, with other e-book formats for the book are available from the O’Reilly web site). Unfortunately the chapter doesn’t seem to have appeared on the O’Reilly web site…

  • Installing an Exchange 2010 Roll-up Update

    Microsoft announced roll-up update 2 (RU2) for Exchange 2010 SP1 amongst the set of updates for different versions of Exchange that the CXP team released in December 2010. I believe that CXP means “customer experience”; in previous times this team might have been known as “ongoing support” or “maintenance engineering”.…

  • On the naming of DAGs

    Most Exchange administrators, even those who don’t have much hands-on experience with Exchange 2010, are now aware that the Database Availability Group (DAG) feature is built on Windows 2008 failover clusters. Exchange 2010 does an excellent job of hiding the complexities of Windows clusters and in normal operation you aren’t…

  • Removing mailbox export and import requests

    Exchange 2010 SP1 introduces a new cmdlet set to handle mailbox export requests to avoid the previous requirement to install Outlook on mailbox servers. With SP1 you can run the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet to create a request for the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) running on a Client Access Server (CAS) to…

  • Tales of the unproductive TMO

    I fear that I am the most unproductive TMO in rugby. The last six matches that I have been involved in have seen just one potential try decision referred to me (480 minutes for one decision, very low productivity). I guess I have been fortunate to work with referees such…

  • Cameras and the TMO

    Following on my post describing some of the challenges facing officials engaged in professional rugby, I received some notes asking me what kind of TV camera angles are available to a TMO when they are asked by a referee to give a decision about a try. I think the question is…

  • One or two NICs?

    During the development of Exchange 2010, Microsoft originally required that any mailbox server participating in a Database Availability Group (DAG) had to be equipped with at least two NICs (Network Interface Controllers). One NIC handles “MAPI” or client traffic; the other handles the replication traffic generated by Exchange to keep…

  • Travel challenges in professional refereeing

    Being part of the refereeing team that works professional matches sounds interesting to people who are fans of the different sports that support professional teams and it is truly wonderful and privileged to be a part of massive sporting events such as a Heineken Cup final. However, like most things…