NFB - server rebuild

[TraceZ]

I rebuilt my network's server this past week. It used to be W2K advanced server with a 80 GB data array that was software raid. It had a 10GB system drive. I ran outlook on the workstations and stored the .PST files on the user's home drives. I backed up the data drive by dragging its contents to a shared backup drive once a week.

The server now runs W2003 enterprise server. The soft data array was replaced with an ATA100 RAID card and two new 80GB hard drives for a new hardware raid drive array of 160GB. The old 10GB system drive was replaced with a spare 120GB drive I had on hand. I loaded Exchange 2003 on the server as well and now our email is stored in exchange instead of in .pst files. I also enabled outlook web access (OWA) so I can now open my outlook from any web browser anywhere. I set up Tami's handheld PC to synch itself over the internet to the exchange server. She now has full access to her outlook wherever there is a wireless access point. It rules! For backup I installed a 250 GB drive in the PC located on our office and shared it as a backup drive. I loaded Veritas BackupExec on the server and it now backs itself up automatically to the shared backup drive every night. Full backups Sunday night and differential backups every other night. I am pumped, this new setup is sweet! I've played around a bit with restoring mailboxes and other data, no problems. I found out that if you restore a mailbox over itself all the info in it gets doubled up. No problem, I just deleted the entire mailbox and restored it once again. Whew.

I havent learned this much in a long time. My sponge is full.

[Jeff_in_Atl]

We need to talk. I am thinking about setting up a server at home too and putting exchange on it. When I get ready, I'll contact you. I have a bunch of other stuff going on now.

Speaking of servers, our CAD server just got rebuilt at work. They were supposed to put in 8 146gig SCSI drives but Dell sent us 73 gigs instead of the 146 gigs. They rebuilt the server and reloaded about 200 gig of stuff not knowing anything was wrong. I came in Monday and asked them about it. After a call to Dell it was confirmed that they installed the wrong drives. Dell is supposed to have new drives to us today. Now we have to do it all over again. What a PITA. The thing that bothers me is nobody noticed anything was wrong except me. Then it took 3 hours to get anyone from IS to even look at it. Dang I hate IS departments.

[TraceZ]

Having exchange at home is great. Getting it set up took some work. I had to use a program called Popcon to get it working. Popcon downloads your email from your ISP and moves it into the proper exchange mailbox. I have it set to poll once a minute. It runs on the server as a service.

Exchange will not do this alone. It will send your email, but not receive it.

Getting Veritas to backup the exchange database was also a huge challenge with user rights. The system accound I created for Veritas needed to have full administrator access to exchange. Settign that up is not obvious and required some research.

Another challenge was setting up my webshares in W2003. IIS in W2003 has an extra level of security. You have to go into the IIS manager and enable annonymous logon for any webshares you might have. PITA. It took me a while to figure out why my webshares were prompting for username and password.

Setting up OWA uses SSL, so it required creating a security certificate. That was another puzzle to figure out requiring lots of research.

Now that it all works like it should it is sweet!!

[Jeff_in_Atl]

Question, Does a phone with e-maill access have to have that e-mail downloaded through the cell system at an extra cost or can it be accesed through a wireless network? If so, does that require a pop server like exchange?

[TraceZ]

Question, Does a phone with e-maill access have to have that e-mail downloaded through the cell system at an extra cost or can it be accesed through a wireless network? If so, does that require a pop server like exchange?

You'd have to call the provider and ask. I'd assume if the provider is also a ISP you could point outlook at their POP and SMTP and get the email that way.