Lifehacker had a great article today showing the good old windows tricks to make your PC faster. Which ones really work? This is definitely worth your time if you are into tweaking or tuning your computers performance.
Windows Maintenance Tips: The Good, Bad, and Useless
You might be surprised which ones help performance vs. hurt performance.
2 Comments | 
Clinton Hague, Tech post | Tagged: lifehacker, performance tips, windows performance, windows tips, windows tweaks | 
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Posted by Russ
OK, who hasn’t tried to get to a website on your internal network using the public name or sometimes IP address when troubleshooting. sure enough, “Page not Found” shows it’s head. But i know it’s there and running, i can get to it using the internal IP or with a modified hosts file. well, a lot of firewalls by default don’t redirect outgoing traffic back into the network. Well, if you are using a pfSense (a FreeBSD based OS focused on firewall and routing tasks), this is a very simple fix.
Assuming you already have the port forwarding set and the site is accessible from the internet, there is only one check mark you need to remove to get this working from the inside. Start by hovering over the “System” in the menu bar, then click “Advanced”.
Home Page of pfSense firewall
From there, scroll almost all the way down to the “Network Address Translation” section, and uncheck the “Disable NAT Reflection” option.
pfSense System -> Advanced -> Network Address Translation
Now you will be able to type the public name or IP address into your browser and be able to see the page being hosted on your internal LAN. No more keeping hosts files to keep things easy, which sounds even easier to me.
1 Comment | Clinton Hague, Corneredge Services, Firewall, Networking, pfSense | Tagged: pfSense, NAT, Firewall config | Permalink
Posted by Clinton
Exchange server 2007 provides higher security and less SPAM potential by elimination authenticated mail over SMTP port 25. This leaves us without the ability to relay mail from other SMTP servers without the following tips.
Here are some setup tips on setting up SMTP relay over port 587 securely.
After setting up your network with a back-end Exchange 2007 Hub Transport/Client Access/Mailbox server and an isolated Exchange 2007 Edge Transport server in a DMZ or separate internal network, try setting up an IMAP connection to the Exchange Client Access server. Since all incoming mail traffic is supposed to flow through the Edge Transport server, you set up that as the endpoint for your outgoing SMTP server in your mail client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, but no matter what you do, it just won’t work without authentication. The Edge Transport server is not (or at least it’s not supposed to be) a member of the domain, and therefore cannot authenticate the user.
One way to fix this is to set your firewall(s) to pass SMTP Submission traffic to the back-end Client Access server (CAS). Mail will be sent first to the back end Exchange Client Access server for authentication, and then be forwarded on to the front end server for external delivery.
Also, don’t forget to to check off the TLS or SSL security option and change the outgoing SMTP port number to 587 for SMTP Submission, rather than port 25 for standard SMTP traffic. And now, you should be sending mail securely.
Leave a Comment » | CES Systems, Clinton Hague, Firewall, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Networking, Outlook, Tech post | Tagged: Exchange, exchange 2007, Exchange Server, Hub Transport Server SMTP, mail relay, MS Exchange, Secure SMTP Relay | Permalink
Posted by Clinton
Well, you took the leap and are now virtualized. You’re now doing more than ever, and data size is growing rapidly. Time to add a new virtual hard drive to your machine, but wait… I said 500 GB, why is it only 256 GB. Well, you hit a limitation of the data store in VMware under your current default configuration. Check to see what your data store block size is. here’s where to find it:
Highlighted you will see the data store block size.
When data stores are created, their default block size is 1 MB, which gives you a maximum virtual hard drive size maximum of 256 GB. So how do you get larger VHD’s?
Hopefully you are reading this and have a brand new ESX/ESXi setup, in which case you can just delete the data store and recreate it, choosing a different block size. If you already have machines running on the data store, you have a project ahead of you, because deleting the data store will format all data on that drive, and you will have to start from scratch, or be creative before you make the change (there are some ideas of how to work around this below).
If you have the disk space to cover 2TB, then I would go with the maximum of 8MB block size to give you a maximum virtual HDD size of 2TB. There is no noticeable I/O performance difference by using maximum size, so use the largest size to mazimize your storage. Here is a quick reference of what block size you can choose and what the maximum VHD that will give you:
Block Size Max VHD size
1MB 256GB
2MB 512GB
4MB 1TB
8MB 2TB
Already have servers running? How do you fix it?
If you already have the data store in use, and can afford some downtime for a maintenance window, here is a workaround you could do, asuming you have more than one ESX(i) server at your disposal. You can power the VM down and use the free VMware vCenter Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) to move the virtual machine from one ESX(i) server to another. Figure on about 1 minute per gig of hard drive size when moving it, with a GB network. Once the VM is moved to its new location, power it an and make sure all is working well before you delete from disk the VM on the original ESX(i) server. Once all the VMs are moved off the ESX server, you can go ahead and remove the data store and create a new one using the new block size.
If you hapen to have your VMs in a cluster with vMotion, this task is even easier, as you can change the location of the datastore through the migrate option. If you dont have any other ESX servers, you could probably do it to VMware Servers, but at that point, you would probably be better just adding multiple drives to the VMs, it would be a lot less work.
Here is a nice reference guide from VMware with this and other importand configuration information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf
6 Comments | CES Systems, Clinton Hague, Corneredge Services, ESX Server, ESXi Server, vmware | Tagged: 256 gig limit, block size, data store size limit, esx, esxi, vmware | Permalink
Posted by Clinton
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