Kendra Thorpe’s VU Blog

The month of fire fighting
I don’t have much in WINS column because we spent much of the month fighting fires and working on life cycle management.

Fire Fighting 101
Our Exchange 2003 had a significant issue involving mail-enabled Active Directory groups. The root cause was a change that we made to the environment nearly a month prior. The change was to make our empty domain a global catalog server. According to Microsoft this configuration is fine. However, when everyone came back from Christmas vacation we began to see this issue with a vengeance. The kicker was the people sending the messages never received an NDR. Unless the sender either contacted the recipient to verify whether he/she received the message, they would be none the wiser. The fix was to either reconfigure all 1500 of our mail-enabled groups to Universal groups or reconfigure the empty domain. We chose to reconfigure the empty domain.

Life Cycle Management
In this space, I spent much of my time updating reports on the runbook to reflect the correct hardware information. I also added in the building and rack information to the “Altiris OS and Runbook Report”. I also created a SQL Reporting Services report that emails itself to our Network Operations Center. This report will be used in the event we have a disaster in our data centers. The “Data Center Disaster Recovery Report” contains the following information:
OS, Primary Administrator, Purchase Date, Device Type, Service Status, Resource Status, Tier Level, Business Function, Manufacturer, Model, Serial Number, Rack, Position, Number of U’s
We also updated the server/service availability for last year.