Unfortunately this isn't one of those success stores. But then again if I wrote about those I'd be hitting a few thousand posts a year, and plus they're really boring to write about. We began the project by powering up some virtual machines and test importing the configuration from ISA 2006 to Forefront TMG 2010, and all appeared fine. The ruleset was there, the VPN configurations were there, and so on.

A little less than a month ago Patrick from Red-Track online marketingcontacted me and wanted to know if I'd be interested in reviewing a TrainSignaltraining DVD, specifically one about Exchange 2010. If you want the final word on the quality of the training head straight to the final paragraph, otherwise strap in; This is a long post. I'll have to be honest, I had never heard of TrainSignal until that point, and I was wondering if it was a bit of a scam.

Mark Baggett over at PauldotComput together an interesting article on running a command on every machine in your domain from the command line. I genuinely hadn't considered tying dsquery and wmi together in this way. The best thing is that with a little tweaking you can easily run the same command against a subset of your domain. For instance, say you had X terminal/web/sql servers that all lived in the same OU - just dsquery against that and you're laughing.

Over Christmas we had to do a bunch of VMWare to Hyper-V conversions at work. Once you've sufficiently prepared the VM, there are a whole bunch of ways you can do this, ranging from raw converting the vmdk, to mounting the vmdk and a blank vhd and then copying the contents between. We chose it as an opportunity to play with Disk2VHDfrom SysInternals. If you're using SCSI disks in your VMWare VM then you will first need to ensure that you add the IDE controller driver, to hopefully avoid a BSOD when you boot under Hyper-V for the first time.

If you've noticedthat the next Ubuntu Server version (10.4, Lucid Lynx) has the Hyper-V kernel modules packaged, alebit in drivers/staging, I'd suggest not dist-upgrade'ing even your development servers for the moment. The reason is simply that you need to devote time to ensuring that the kernel modules will continue to work with each kernel version - right now you can't seem to rely on the modules actually loading successfully from the corresponding /lib/modules/2.

If you've got an application that sends messages via your Exchange 2010 server, using SMTP, you might've noticed that things have slowed down a bit. The reason for this is because the Exchange 2010 receive connectors have a “MaxAcknowledgementDelay” setting, that will inform you if the delivery is successful, within a certain time frame. If the timelimit is hit, it then acks the submission. To disable this you can set your receive connector not to use this feature:

If you're having fun with a pre-2007 version of Outlook, or any non-Microsoft product trying to talk MAPI to an Exchange 2010 server you might be interested in knowing that the defaults have now changed in the new version, and it expects traffic to be encrypted. This caught us out today as we'd only tested Outlook 2007 before rolling one of our boxes over to 2010 over the weekend. Two options;

On the off chance you're intending to do any development with using SqlSrvand ZF, I'd suggest taking a cursory look at ZF-7431before hand. Equally if you're planning on doing any dev with Sqlsrv and plan to migrate to other SQL platforms later, then it could be just as helpful. The fact that SqlSrv will return PHP objects is rather nice, unless you already have existing code that assumes strings are returned, like almost all other database extensions available for PHP.