General IT

Useful Exchange 2010 / 2013 Powershell commands

Test readiness of mailbox to be moved:
New-MoveRequest -Identity ‘user@domain’ -TargetDatabase “Mailbox Database” -WhatIf
Remove the -WhatIf to move the mailbox
Move all mailboxes:
Get-Mailbox -Database “Old Mailbox Database” | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase “New Mailbox Database”

Remove all move requests:
get-moverequest | remove-moverequest -confirm:$false

List open move requests:
Get-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase “Mailbox Database”
Get-MoveRequest –identity ‘user@domain’

Get statistics on move request in detail:
get-moverequest | get-moverequeststatistics | fl
 
Get statistics on move request in summary:
get-moverequest | get-moverequeststatistics

Get statistics for database:
Get-MailboxStatistics -database “Mailbox database”

Sage 300 ERP and Windows 8

Ran into a funny issue with running Sage 300 ERP from a network location. I was completely unable to pin the program shortcut to my taskbar. This was regardless of whether I right clicked the app in the Start Page, right clicked the .exe file in the runtime folder on the shared network folder, or on the shortcut I created on the desktop:

I couldn’t even drag the .exe or shortcut to the taskbar:

This is apparently “by design”. Indeed, there are even certain executable files as well as shortcuts that contain certain strings (for example,  “Help”, “Documentation”, “Install”) that are excluded from pinning!

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Where is the “Send to Mail Recipient” option in Office 2010?

A client just contacted me asking how he could email a document he’d created directly from Outlook. In 2007 he would just press the envelope button and off it would go. In Word 2010 it now only offers the option to send as an attachment… or so it would appear on the surface.

The option is actually still there, just hidden away. To enable this option do the following:

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Baremetal restore from WHS with no working network driver.

One of our notebooks suffered catastrophic hard drive failure and I needed to do a bare metal restore from Windows Home Server. Thankfully I haven’t fully decommissioned it yet since I haven’t yet found a suitable backup replacement. After a quick trip to my suppliers, who swapped the drive out in less time than it took to drive to them, I popped in the recovery cd and followed the prompts until it got to the driver section. Of course, to prevent things from being too easy, it couldn’t find a network driver. This is apparently not that uncommon since the PE environment is a basic one and can’t support all drivers. No problem, I mount the backup image via the WHS console on a second PC and copy the “Windows Home Server Drivers for Restore” folder onto a USB stick. Pop the USB into the notebook and press scan, still doesn’t find it. I google a bit and find that this is again not that uncommon an issue.

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How old is this Windows installation?

I’ve often been faced with this question when sitting at a client’s site and debating whether the quickest fix isn’t perhaps a reinstall of the OS. It always helps to know when the system was last (re)installed. Thanks to this blog (blog.dampee.be), I found the answer. (And as is usually the case I wasn’t even looking for this at the time).

There is a little command called sysinfo which is documented on Technet. Simply open a cmd prompt and run the command. Scroll back up and you should see the following lines:

My Windows Home Server Journey

Well I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who was quite peeved with Microsoft’s decision to can Windows Home Server. I know this is old news, and the canning of Drive Extender even older news, but since their decision only impacts my life now, it’s only become relevant to me now.

My faithful Windows Home Server v1 has served me well over the past couple of years but has recently started to develop some annoying quirks. Like freezing. And then freezing during the POST, and then freezing during boot and then, well, you get the picture. So it was time to go shopping! I purchased the HP N40L  as it was cheap, quiet and I figured I wouldn’t have any driver issues with whatever OS I decided to replace WHS with. You can watch a review here.

So now the search was on, I had a couple of choices: stick with WHS v1, buy WHS 2011, install an opensource solution or use Storage Server 2012. Continue reading

Accpac and MS-SQL Server

Stephen Smith has written an excellent article sharing some tips and tricks for configuring Microsoft SQL for use with Sage Accpac on his blog.

Limiting Exchange 2010 Database Cache

I recently installed a Small Business Server 2011 at a client with some kickass hardware.  Imagine our surprise when we tried to actually run anything on the server and it CRAWLED, I mean seriously slow. Even to the point of opening files via the shared folders from a workstation was slow. It was a bit disturbing to say the least. I found the problem to be that Exchange 2010 was using up all available memory, as in a 12Gb store.exe process. I did some googling and found that this behaviour is actually by design. Now that’s great if it’s a dedicated Exchange server. However, when Microsoft have specifically designed SBS to run everything on one box and will only allow you to run it on one box according to the license, it just doesn’t make sense! (Thankfully with the Premium Edition they do allow you a seperate free licence to run SQL on a seperate box). I came across a workaround to the problem on  Continue reading

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