Disaster Recovery Planning for Cloud and Hybrid Cloud and On-Premises

With the RackSpace situation looking to be beyond worst hitting the sacrosanct “Thou Shalt NOT Lose Data” wall, a little digging was done here to find some info on who is responsible for what when the data is in the cloud. In this case, Microsoft is the focus but one […]

Exchange OWA and ECP 503 and Outlook Disconnected Error Fix

We just updated an Exchange Third Party Trusted HTTPS certificate for the public facing Outlook Web Access (OWA) setup. Everything seemed to be okay until we rebooted the Exchange server within a maintenance window. All Outlook clients and OWA access went offline with the OWA site throwing a 503 error. […]

Cluster Finesse – Rename Those Cluster Shared Volume Folders

We’re in a pickle and things are really stressful. Documentation is lacking so who wants to jump into a cluster troubleshooting situation when all we see is: C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1 C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2 ETC ETC In a busy cluster environment the number of CSV folders can be quite large. What we do is once […]

Azure: Creating an SSL Certificate on IIS then Importing the .PFX

We use IIS to create the CSR and to complete the Certificate Request. We use the Computer Certificates MMC to export that certificate to .PFX. When exporting with the intent to import the .PFX into Azure we run the following steps: Open the Computer Certificates MMC Click on Start and […]

Remote Desktop Shadow Replacement for CoPilot: Microsoft Quick Assist

With the demise of the CoPilot service we’ve been using for about a decade now, we had to look for something to replace it. CoPilot was a simple to use remote desktop shadowing product that was very reasonable in cost. What we’ve come to use is free and built-in to […]

Server/NAS Recipe for Storage Spaces or FreeNAS Veeam Backup Storage

The following is a recipe that we’d look at using for a backup destination for Veeam. Our current preference is for Storage Spaces set up for the requested 64KB Allocation Size but we’re looking into Linux Harden Repositories as an option. FreeNAS Operating System Ubuntu Server Distro Silverstone CS381 Chassis […]

PowerShell Guide: Install Exchange Server 2019 CU11+ Into Server Core

We’ve added the following PowerShell Guide to our KB: PowerShell Guide: Install Exchange 2019 CU11+ into Windows Server Core The above PowerShell allows us to install on Windows Server Core but it also has the setup for breaking out the three components of Exchange into their own partition: D: Exchange […]