We had a good one at work the other day. One of our customer's terminal servers, from their load balanced cluster, had run out of diskspace on C:, due to a rogue update of some bespoke software and a lack of quotas. This is something which was missed from the config, but we or the customer never noticed, as we're pretty good at monitoring this stuff and resolving the issue before it causes trouble.

Transport rules are a new thing for Exchange, in it's latest incarnation (Exchange 2007), and it allows for some pretty interesting configuration and behaviour when a mail is in transit. If you're familiar with earlier versions of Exchange it's probably best to compare them to Event Sinks, only that they're much more friendly. If you don't know what that means then a more apt description would be simple to create rules, that allow you to do anything from append text to the bottom of an email, to apply filters on messages between both internal and external users.

It's probably no secret to some people who read this that I do a fair bit of work with terminal servers and thin clients (dumb, low power machines that connect to a terminal or citrix server). However, most deployments I've been involved with at work at relatively small, our largest of which has recently gone up to a load balanced set of 5 Windows Terminal Servers, a few weekends ago.

A few weeks ago I had to setup my first IPSec tunnel between ISA 2004 and a non-Windows device, in this case a Draytek Vigor 2800, to create a site-to-site VPN. I had a few things that I hit on the Draytek which stumped me for a little bit (although probably could've been resolved much more quickly had I been more familiar with a Draytek Vigor I fear). First thing I did was to head into the ISA console and setup an IPSec tunnel, using almost all of the defaults (this is important as the settings for the Draytek must match the ISA/Windows defaults).

Restricted Groups is a part of the GPO Computer configuration tree that I've not ever used until today, primarily because I'd never looked into what it does exactly, and partially because it has a misleading name (in my mind) and I assumed that it did something else. What this feature allows you to do is configure member ship of groups within Active Directory or in the local groups of domain computers.

If you're having trouble with networking on both the host and guest machines, and are running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on a broadcom network card, the chances are that you're running old drivers. Update them directly from the broadcom website and you should be good to go. Interestingly it appears that IBM, and Dell, are still distributing installation aids with the older drivers, which cause issues in this situation. To be relatively technical it appearsthat arp packets aren't responded to or sent out correctly.

Able to connect, but appear not to beable to recieve any packets? Go into the properties of the VPN, go to security and untick “Require data encryption (disconnect if none)". In XP < SP3 this has always been ticked for my tunnels and I've never had a disconnection, but it appears that something in SP3 RC0 makes some behaviour change, but doesn't actually disconnect the tunnel. I've not discovered why this happens, but this has fixed it on my main desktop and on my virtual machines.

Converting a physical machine to a virtual machine can be a bit of an arduous task under many virtualisation solutions, and the various Microsoft solutions are no exception. Microsoft have released the VS Migration Tool Kit, however this unfortunately requires ADS 1.0 to be deployed. In my instance this isn't suitable. However, what you should realise is that it's simply possible to make an image of the hard disk, restore it and then quickly wap Windows on top again, as the quickest hands-free fix to sort any BSOD or driver issues (if required).