An IT contractor by design, is a person who can enter a client's site and very quickly become the expert within that entity, It is a requirement that we become the most knowledgeable person within that particular infrastructure or our clients would benifit more by training up an FTE.
In the words of Albert Einstien:
When asked for his telephone number, he walked over to a telephone directory, and looked it up saying to a rather surprised onlooker " An intelligent man is not a man who can store information, but a man who knows how to find it".
With experience we IT Contractors understand better than anyone how technology and heterogeneous environments communicate, and knowing how to find information makes us experts in our chosen fields.
This allows us to be the greatest benifit to our clients. I hope you enjoy this site.
Organizations that use Exchange quickly grow beyond the mindset of using the system simply to provide a mailbox for each employee and at some point will create mailboxes that aren’t tied to a specific person but rather to the organization, a business unit, or a function. I call such mailboxes resource accounts. For example, companies often create addresses with names like support@ and help@ so that customers can email their tech support–related questions and problems to these addresses. Some organizations also create mailboxes to distribute communications outward to many recipients. But a mailbox might not always be the best, most cost-effective choice. Organizations might need to consider they need yet another mailbox or use an alternative option. Let's explore how to use the different types of Exchange resources and points to consider when creating resource accounts.
DNS is often considered a “black box” in the sense that once you have it configured and working, it’s very hard to figure out why it breaks. Yet the health of your Exchange environment is tied to the health of your network’s DNS operations. There are three classes of DNS problems that can adversely affect Exchange: overall connectivity between Exchange servers and DNS servers, overall performance of DNS servers, and the DNS servers’ integrity—that is, the optimal configuration from both a technical and best-practices standpoint. Every DNS problem you encounter should fall into one of these categories. I’ll provide an in-depth look at DNS, its core components, and the approach you should take when troubleshooting specific classes of issues. Understanding the different classes of DNS issues and the troubleshooting process required to approach a specific type of issue will demystify DNS so that it’s no longer the black box it typically is for Exchange administrators. I’ll begin by looking at DNS’s related connectivity and performance issues, and in an upcoming article, I’ll explore DNS integrity.
Making remote connections to servers for management and administration is a core requirement for every systems administrator. As long as Windows remains a predominately GUI-focused interface, we remain reliant on remote control software that provides access to the entire Windows interface. During the past few years, Remote Desktop Connection has become the de facto standard for remotely managing Windows computers for three primary reasons: performance is good, multiple people can connect to the same computer at the same time, and it’s free and included by default with every version of Windows since Windows 2000.
Remote Desktop Connection 6.0, the latest version of Microsoft's free RDP client, is included with Windows Vista and can be downloaded for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Microsoft did a good job maintaining backward compatibility, so you can upgrade to the new client and still connect to Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Win2K computers. Microsoft added many new features in anticipation of Windows Vista and Longhorn, but you can take advantage of other new features now. Some new features enhance Remote Desktop Connection's security and performance.
