WinDirStat

While reading through this month's "Windows IT Pro" magazine(www.windowsitpro.com/), I spotted this WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/) listed in the free utilities section. This utility will scan a drive and all its directory structures, then graphically show you where all the space on it is being used. It shows you the breakdown per directory tree and what percentage of space is used by each filetype on the drive. You can click on any of the 'boxes' in the visualization it creates at the bottom of the application to zoom right down to the location on the drive it represents.Needless to say this is now going to be a standard tool to be installed on my file servers.

Download link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

IronKey review

I've been playing around with the new Ironkey USB drive this week and it's pretty impressive. Sure we've all played with the software encryption options on normal USB drives and the ability to run apps off the drive is old hat to U3 users but the introduction of hardware based encryption into the sub $100 market is a nice change.
For those of you who haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, check out Ironkey's website at https://www.ironkey.com/. It has an AES 256 cipher chip in it and automatically destroys itself after 10 consequetive bad password attempts. Yes, I said destroy - your data will be forever lost. The drive comes preloaded with a locked down version of firefox and you have the option of using their secure network as a proxy and surf the web anonymously.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's waterproof and has a solid metal casing that feels pretty sturdy.
Overall it seems like a fairly secure device but if you're not feeling that paranoid, you can always use software based options like Truecrypt (free, easy to use) http://www.truecrypt.org/

Exch2k7 Even 1035 - Inbound Authentication Failed

So shortly after upgrading our Exchange system to 2007, I started having trouble receiving emails from this one company. The following error would not go away and all other servers out there in the web that we sent mail to or received mail from had no problems. Even though Anonymous access was enabled on my Hub Transport server, the other server kept trying to authenticate with us.

Event Type: Error

Event Source: MSExchangeTransport

Event Category: SmtpReceive

Event ID: 1035

Date: 6/29/2007

Time: 11:17:42 AM

User: N/A

Computer: EXCHANGE2007

Description:

Inbound authentication failed with error LogonDenied for Receive connector Default EXCHANGE2007. The authentication mechanism is Gssapi. The source IP address of the client who tried to authenticate to Microsoft Exchange is .

So after many unsuccesful searches on the web, the microsoft newsgroups, etc I finally wound up using the empirical method and tried disabling some of the authentication methods. I restarted the Hub Transport service after each test to make sure the settings kicked in and voila the error went away. In the end, I wound up disabling the "Exchange Server authentication" and the "Integrated Windows authentication" options under Authentication under the Default Receive connector on my Hub Transport server. Since I don't have multiple Hub Transport servers this won't affect my environment for now and hopefully by the time I do it won't matter.

Connecting to an nortel RCC database for third party reporting

The nortel Reporting for call center server uses mysql for it's local database of call activity. Should you want to login to it and check the tables, you first have to find out what port it is on, dig through the installation scripts to find the username and password, etc. As of v2.4.344.1.61, here's the info to save you some time:

1. Test that you can connect to it with mysql itself. CD to the bin folder of the mysql install on the RCC server.
2. mysql --port=3309 --user=rccuser --password
3. It will then prompt you for the password which can be found in the "AddUser.scr" file (open with notepad) located at Program Files\Nortel\Reporting for Contact Center\RunOnce. It will be surrounded by ' and located after the username which is rccuser
4. Once you are logged in, type in show databases; (always end in semicolon). This will show you all the databases.
5. Type in use ccrdb;
6. Then use show tables; to display the tables.

Now that you've confirmed the port, username and password you have will work, now you can use Crystal or some other reporting package that supports mysql connections to generate your own reports.