Steve Evans has worked in the IT field for over 12 years, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He has consulted for small businesses on their IT infrastructure needs as well as worked for larger companies as a Systems Engineer. Steve has been a recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for the past 3 years, and is a Technical Speaker at various industry events.
Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tool – Update
This is an update to my previous blog.
I got an e-mail from a Microsoft guy (Scott Schnoll) and some feedback on the exchange2000@yahoogroups list so I’ll update here. By the way the e-mail from Scott Schnoll is basically also posted as a comment from him. Kind of cool that people from Microsoft actually care what I’m saying.
First of all the “Click here for more information” links work now. They started working about 15 minutes after I originally posted.
One of Scott’s comments was about the SMTP max message size. He says that 20mb might be to low and should be wisely chosen. I’ve always thought that 20mb is really high. Based on “polls” on the Exchange2000 Yahoo Groups list I’ve rarely seen people much above 20mb, usually more like 10mb. I’ve also created an application that allows my users to upload a file to a website and send a link to recipients to download.
About WINS being blank I guess it’s true that in larger organizations that WINS is required. But if everything is published in DNS, and my client is configured to do short name resolution, doesn’t that negate the need for WINS? What the tool needs is a smart way to determine if WINS is needed. However I haven’t come up with a good idea for that (heck I didn’t even know that people still used WINS if they don’t have NT4 anymore)
The other really interesting comment was on the License Logging Service. I’m really confused now. I had one comment that pointed out specific KB’s that without the license logging service you can only have 10 authenticated SSL connections, while still having unlimited Anonymous connections (since Windows 2000 SP2 that’s the case). Since I use Forms Based Authentication, as far as IIS is concerned they are anonymous connections. When I get back in the office I’ll test this out to see if that’s really the case. Unless someone comments and verifies this for me before then.
All that said I think I should point out that I think it’s a great tool. Especially for the first version. I’ve heard rumors about it being integrated with MOM which would be great. I know that MBSA is leveraged in MOM 2005 but I haven’t gotten it run successfully yet. (Although I haven’t really tried yet)
Also I want to point out that this is the blog entry that got my blog on the map. I went from a handful of hits a day (probably mostly from me) to a couple hundred on the blog, and it looks like a couple hundred people have subscribed to the RSS feed. It’s really easy to track unique users to the blog, but not to the RSS feed. I need to get better reporting software for that.