Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Tool Tip: mRemote

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 9. July, 2008
in Tools
. 0 Comments

Found this cool tool, mRemote – it’s  a full featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. I’ve previously used Microsoft’s own Remote Desktops and Visionapp’s Remote Desktop, both can handle multiple RDP connections in one interface.

mRemote does the same, it just has more feature and is open source. So if you need a good tool to manage multiple servers, I can recommend mRemote.

It even supports more protocols, such as:

Download it at mRemote.org

IIS 7.0 PowerShell Provider CTP2 Released

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 7. July, 2008
in Scripting
. 0 Comments

Last week Microsoft released the Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) of the new PowerShell Provider for IIS 7.0, it’s now available for download from the IIS.net website.

New features in CTP2:

  • IIS7 Powershell provider now supports SSL (installing and acquiring a certificate, creating an ssl site binding)
  • Tech Preview 2 ships with 40 new cmdlets. All of these cmdlets are for day-to-day IIS tasks like creating web-sites, web-applications, enabled request tracing, adding a handler or a module.

PowerShell Provider features:

  • Create Web-Sites, Web Applications, Virtual Directories and Application Pools
  • Change Simple Configuration Properties on Web-Sites, Application Pools, Web Applications and Virtual Directories
  • Add and Change Complex Configuration Settings
  • Query Run-time Data (Web-Site State, Application Pool State, Currently Executing Requests)
  • Execute Advanced Configuration Tasks, Scripting, Integration with other PowerShell Snap-Ins and features
  • Search and Discover Configuration Settings

Download links:

Read more at Thomas Deml’s blog.

ISA Server 2006 SP1 Released

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 3. July, 2008
in ISA Server
. 0 Comments

ISA Server 2006 SP1 was released last night. The new SP includes a lot of new improvements. Here’s a list of the new features:

· Configuration Change Tracking — logs all configuration changes applied to ISA Server configuration to help you backtrack through your change history.

· Web Publishing Rule Test Button — helps you verify that the rule configuration agrees with what is set at the published web server and provides specific suggestions when they disagree.

· Traffic Simulator — simulates network traffic as it would be seen by the ISA rules engine and gives you specific information about traffic processing along the way.

· Diagnostic Logging Query — an extension to the Diagnostic Logging feature provided in the Supportability Pack, this feature makes it much easier to see only the data that is relevant to the current troubleshooting effort.

ISA Server 2006 SP1 also includes such feature improvements as:

· Support for Network Load Balancing (NLB) multicast and multicast with IGMP operations (KB 938550)

· Support for certificates with multiple Subject Alternative Name (SAN) entries in published web servers

· Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) authentication supports trusted-domain user accounts (KB 942637 )

Download it here.

Reference: ISA Team Blog

Article: IIS 7.0 – FTP Publishing Service – Part 2

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 3. July, 2008
in Articles
. 0 Comments

My latest article have gone live – I’ve written a new article on www.windowsnetworking.com. It’s Part 2 in a series about the new FTP Publishing Service for IIS 7.0.

This article covers different configuration scenarios of the new FTP Publishing Service for IIS 7.0.

Read the full article here: IIS 7.0 – FTP Publishing Service – Part 2: Configuration

PFDAVAdmin and Exchange 2007

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 2. July, 2008
in Exchange
. 1 Comment

If you have never used PFDAVAdmin (Public Folder DAV-based Administration Tool) to manage public folders and mailbox permissions, take a look at it, it’s a pretty nice utility. It’s not a new tool, but it can help you to do a lot of things “in bulk” that you might not have done as easily otherwise or at least certainly not as quickly. PFDAVAdmin works with Exchange 2000/2003/2007.

When working with Public Folder permissions on Exchange 2007 the tool is a great addition, for everyone who might not be that confident with managing PF permissions though the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) and would like a GUI for it.

However working with PFDAVAdmin on Exchange 2007 servers, I have seen this “error” message:
‘Could not expand https://localhost/exadmin/admin/mydomain.com/public%20folders/ : name cannot begin with the ’0′ character, hexadecimal value 0×30. Line 1, position 386′

The reason for this error is because PFDAVAdmin uses Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 (Exchange 2007 uses the .NET Framework 2.0) and if that is not installed, you’ll get the error message above.

Microsoft recommends using PFDAVAdmin from a workstation, not from the console of the Exchange 2007 server, though. So if you get this message, do NOT install the .NET Framework 1.1 on an existing Exchange 2007 server. You risk breaking the Exchange Server 2007! If you really want to run PFDAVAdmin from the console of an Exchange 2007 server, you would need to install the .NET Framework 1.1 prior to building Exchange.

Even so, using PFDAVAdmin from the workstation is much more desirable and recommended.

Download PFDAVAdmin here.

Microsoft MVP: IIS

Published
by
Peter Schmidt
on 1. July, 2008
in IIS
. 1 Comment

I am very happy and honored to announce that I’ve been awarded the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) award for 2008, for my contributions to the Microsoft IIS Community. This is my first MVP award, so I’m truly honored. So thank you Microsoft and the people who nominated me, it’s great to be recognized!

MVP

Congrats to all the other newly and renewed MVPs!