Making Google the default search provider

Paste this in to IE, goodbye BING ;)


http://www.iegallery.com/gb/addons/detail.aspx?id=13438

All OUs in this domain should be protected from accidental deletion

Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -filter * -Properties ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion | where {$_.ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion -eq $false} | Set-ADOrganizationalUnit -ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion $true

SBS 2011 move SharePoint wizard breaks SharePoint

After installing SBS 2011 you should always use the wizard to move the data files off the system drive elsewhere. I did this with the SharePoint data after patching the server, but later found SharePoint was broken.


After some hacking around I discovered that the crappy wizard had not changed the paths in the registry. I altered these manually, then restarted the server and all was well again.


Thanks Microsoft! Sloppy code!

Changing Public Folder replication message priority to urgent in bulk

When you are migrating away from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007/2010 you must mive all public folders off from the old server. This is done by using the Move all replicas option under the public folders menu. To speed things up each public folder should have its message priority set to urgent. But what happens if you have 1000's of folders? The solution I found is to use PFDAVadmin which can be found on the Microsoft website. Make sure you have a working backup before you begin. Stopping MSExchangeIS and copying the pub1.edb elsewhere works nicely!


First you need to connect to the Exchange server and AD.

Then select Custom Bulk operation.

Then click add and select Other folder properties. This process needs repeating for system folders too.

Select Modify and in the property drop-down find PR_REPLICATION_MESSAGE_PRIORITY and enter the value 1

Next click OK

PFDAVadmin works through the database altering the values. This can take some time if you have lots of folders.

When we inspect the setting on any of the folders you can see the Replication message priority has been altered.

Slow network performance on ESXi hosts with link aggregation

I was getting really slow network throughput from all VMs on a 4GB LAG using ESXi 5.0.0 with the IP hash load balancing policy. 250MB file was taking 20 minutes!! This was with a Dell PowerConnect 5524 in a two switch stack. The LAG was configured correctly.

PowerConnect#conf

PowerConnect(Conf)#interface gi1/0/1-2,gi2/0/1-2

PowerConnect(Conf-if)# spanning-tree portfast

PowerConnect(Conf-if)# channel-group 1 mode on

PowerConnect(Conf-if)# exit

PowerConnect(Conf)#exit

PowerConnect#copy running-config startup-conf

The LAG was up as this command showed.
PowerConnect#sh interface status po1

We tested the connection between the VM and my laptop using iperf 


From the VM we ran:
c:\>iperf -s


From my laptop:
c:\>iperf -c 172.x.x.x -i5 -t120 -w1492k


The throughput was not acceptable, giving approx 600Kbps


We broke the stack by pulling power out on the bottom switch and reran the iperf. As you can see things where great again.

Turns out you can't use HDMI 1.3 cables for the stack uplink. It must be HDMI 1.4 which supports EtherLink 


The moral of the story is don't use cheap HDMI cables. Thanks to Mike for is input diagnosing this.