Brien Posey

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…

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….

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…

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,…

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…

Lately, it seems as though everyone that I talk to is interested in virtualizing at least some of the servers in their organization. Although Hyper-V does a great job as a virtual server hosting solution, it does have some quirks that you might not expect. In this article, I want to talk about some of…

In the previous article in this series, I showed you how to create a postmaster address that could be used to intercept replies to non-delivery reports.  What you might not realize though, is that not all non-delivery reports are created equally.  In this article, I want to show you how to analyze the contents of…

One of the things that I’ve always found interesting about Exchange Server 2007 is that the Exchange Management Console was built on top of the Exchange Management Shell.  As such, anything that you can do through the console can also be done from a command line.  For the most part, I have always preferred to…

In the previous article in this series (Using Exchange Management Shell to Configure Content Filtering, Part 1), I showed you how to use the Set-ContentFilterConfig command to specify bypassed sender domains in Exchange Server 2007. As you may recall though, the biggest problem was that whenever you enter this command, the existing list of bypassed…

In the previous article, I showed you how to install the Print Management console. In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to migrate other network print servers to the  network print server that you’ve created. Network Printer Migration Now that you have an enterprise print management server in place, you…

We’ve all occasionally run into situations in which we have tried to e-mail someone and received an unexpected non delivery report. To a techie, a non delivery report contains a wealth of information that can be used to figure out why the message didn’t reach its intended recipient (I will be discussing this in detail…

A lot of Exchange administrators are surprised to learn that in most cases a new Exchange Server 2007 deployment is not able to send mail to the outside world until the administrator does some additional configuration.  The reason for this is that unless you have installed an Edge transport server, and created an Edge subscription,…