IT Knowledgebase Articles

In part one of this article series, I showed you how to create a recovery storage group, and how to restore data to it. In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to use your recovery storage group to recover data. Mounting the Recovery Storage Group The first thing that you…

Recovery storage groups were first introduced in Exchange Server 2003.  At the time, the idea behind them was that you could restore Exchange database into the recovery storage group, and then use ExMerge to merge the data from the recovery storage group into the production database.  In Service Pack 1, Microsoft improve the process so…

In the first part of this article series, I talked about the differences between a stand-alone DFS namespace and a domain based DFS namespace.  The next thing I want to discuss is the replication topology that will be used by your DFS servers. Why Replicate? When I have introduced the concept of DFS to clients…

Note:This article is a follow up to Planning a DFS Architecture Part One and Part Two. Although Windows Server 2008 improves upon DFS technology, DFS has been around for quite a while, and I have learned quite a bit over the years about planning for DFS replication.  I’m not talking about the replication topology itself,…

When it comes to configuring file servers, many administrators choose to use a distributed file system  (DFS) rather than a traditional standalone share point, because of the redundancy that DFS provides. Although DFS can greatly improve the performance and availability of the data stored on your network, these benefits come at a price. There are…

In the second article in this series, I mentioned that one of the biggest improvements in performance monitoring was the addition of Data Collector Sets. Data Collector Sets are collections of performance monitor counters and system traces, that are all related to a specific purpose. In this article, I will show you how they work….

The Windows Performance Monitor has been around in one form or another since the days of Windows NT.  Even so, this is one tool that I rarely see anyone use in the real world.  I suspect that the reason for this is probably that the Performance Monitor tends to be both tedious and difficult to…

Of all the features included in Microsoft Outlook, my favorite has to be cached mode.  In case you’re not familiar with cached mode, it is a mechanism that copies the contents of a user’s mailbox, calendar, etc. into an offline file called an “OST” file.  This allows the user to have full access to anything…

So far in this article series I’ve shown you how to create a dedicated postmaster mailbox that can be used to intercept responses to non-delivery reports, and I wrote another article that discusses the meaning of various types of non-delivery reports.  If you read that article, you know that some types of nondelivery reports can…

Disk quotas were originally introduced in Windows 2000, but have improved in each subsequent version of Windows. Of course these constant improvements mean that the way that this quotas are implemented have changed from one version of Windows to the next. In this article, I will show you how disk quota management works in Windows…