On a recent endeavor, I needed to create 1400+ folders on a file share named staffweb (part of our domain migration). Essentially, the permissions on the staffweb folder enable www access to each individual’s published content (via IIS). The server OS which houses the share is Server 08 R2, which was particularly frustrating at first because I could not use the standard xcacls.exe to set the permissions when the folders were created. Where the script used to work fine on Server 03, it just wouldn’t work on Server 08. By using a combination of scripts, I accomplished the task, but ironically, I had to break out some old school scripting techniques to set the ACL’s properly. Below are both scripts… continue reading…
One item of importance for a school district is for folks at schools to be able to publish calendars to the web, either to a blog, wiki, or school site. In my attempt to track down a simple How To on the topic, I did not find the specific steps to accomplishing task, so I have opted to create this one. Keep in mind that this method of publishing calendar content to the web essentially replaces the legacy public folders seen in previous versions of exchange server. As part of this How To, I have added the steps to add designated editors of a shared calendar. These are the steps I followed… continue reading…
A recent query to the Exchange forums suggested that the documentation from Microsoft regarding Room Resource Policy with Delegates is not complete. Upon further review, I discovered the process is rather simple, but not intuitive nor well documented… continue reading…
One very important aspect of calendar management is the ability to have globally shared calendar information available for publication to the internet or an intranet. To accomplish this, certain requirements must be met prior to publicly or privately “publishing” shared calendar information. The following are some basics that an Exchange administrator will need to know in order to successfully create publishable calendar content. continue reading…
How to set access rights for calendars in Exchange 2010
January 8, 2011
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Since most of our users at work run on Macintosh, we have them use OWA exclusively. One caveat to doing so revealed a hope-to-be-resolved-soon bug which no doubt other OWA users will observe along the way-a user cannot share their calender with permissions greater than “Reviewer”. The workaround at the moment requires server-side resolution, which from a sysadmin’s perspective, is not welcomed overhead in managing an already expansive system such as Exchange. It is easy enough however, to extend permissions on user’s calendars. The following is an outline to do just that:
Custom MMC’s on Terminal Server
January 7, 2011
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I am a huge believer in managing Active Directory from both a centralized and decentralized mode. I work in an environment where we have a 9 to 1 ratio of Macintosh versus PC based systems. We needed to give specific people, specific access to parts of Active Directory so they could essentially fill the role of helpdesk (since this position no longer exists in our department). Without being able to give them an ADUC client (Mac), we needed to come up with another solution. Creating a terminal server with customized MMC’s which launch at login and according to their group is what we were after. The following is the quick and easy setup of such. continue reading…
php5-filter (missing header) issue resolved…
December 27, 2010
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On a recent portupgrade I received some dreaded ***stop error***’s regarding php5-filter and php5-zip ports. The output was as follows:
“Skipping ‘lang/php5-extensions’ (php5-extensions-1.3) because a requisite package ‘php5-zip-5.2.12′ (archivers/php5-zip)
failed (specify -k to force)
** Listing the failed packages (-:ignored / *:skipped / !:failed)
- devel/automake110 (port directory error)
- devel/automake19 (port directory error)
! devel/autoconf (autoconf-2.62) (install error)
* devel/autoconf (autoconf-2.67)
* lang/php5 (php5-pcre-5.2.12)
* lang/php5 (php5-spl-5.2.12)
! security/php5-filter (php5-filter-5.2.12) (missing header)
! archivers/php5-zip (php5-zip-5.2.12) (missing header)
* lang/php5-extensions (php5-extensions-1.3)”
At first, I needed to resolve the autoconf issue and a pkg_info *auto yeilded some interesting information-four different versions of each with separate wrappers. Apparently devel/autotools has had some ongoing cleanup taking place, which AHEM (yes, I make bonehead sysadmin mistakes too 
, I failed to catch while reading the /usr/ports/UPDATING file prior to running portugrade… continue reading…
While polling the microsoft exchange team site recently, I found this post about an internal tool the dev team has available to them, which recently has been made public. After a quick download and setup of RDCman, I was off and running. I exported my current list of servers straight out of “remote desktops” tool and directly into rdcman. Once some intitial editing was done for credentials to each server (we have two domains, each with different admin credentials), it was time to check it out. continue reading…
Add VMWare Network Drivers to Server 2008 Core
May 29, 2009
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So, in a recent install of server core (2008) on our vmware cluster, I noticed that network driver support for the default enhanced vmxnet card is, of course, not included. Adding the drivers is very straight forward though and this is the process I followed. First, you will need the drivers contained within the default windows.iso file included in the vmware esx installation. You can find the windows.iso file in the /vmimages/tools-isoimages/ folder on the root of the esx server. continue reading…
How to: Install Private Root CA into ADManager Plus
April 8, 2009
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Frustrated by the lack of documentation by Adventnet on this topic, I decided to dig into and discover the proper procedure on installing an SSL certificate that would work for their ADManagerPlus application. Having some previous experience with Java certificate stores, I used that knowledge to complete the task. If you are like me, I tried to use Adventnet’s documentation but kept getting stuck on how to embed the Root CA correctly (knowing this from the fact that https revealed an untrusted certificate!). This is the process I followed to get ADManagerPlus working with our private Root CA…
