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You are here: Home / 2015 / Archives for March 2015

Archives for March 2015

Sender ID Framework (highly recommended)

March 20, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp Leave a Comment

As we all know, e-mail is a very important part of our daily lives. At least, during our daily job. When we talk about e-mail it is clear that the number of SPAM messages is increasing. Apart from the fact that SPAM is annoying, it is also a potential threat. By means of SPAM; spoofing and phishing is often used to steal someone’s identity. It can harm the reputation of the domain owner. SPAM can also consumes unnecessary bandwidth and affect overall performance of a mail server.

Anti-SPAM:

Of course we often use Anti-SPAM filters. A disadvantage of Anti-SPAM is that it sometimes marks e-mail messages as SPAM while it isn’t, with the risk losing legitimate e-mail. And every now and then an unwanted SPAM message gets through. This is why we constantly have to be kept up-to-date with Anti-SPAM definitions. Fortunately, more and more is done in terms of legislation against SPAM. But the harder we fight against SPAM it will never solve the problem entirely.

If you zoom in on SPAM then there is something that is not so noticeable; it’s always the receiver that needs to protect themselves against SPAM. Right?

The fact is, the owner of a domain can definitely do something about it. A very good method is using the Sender ID Framework (SIDF). From my own experience, I can highly recommend Sender ID Framework! It is very easy to apply, and it is totally free. Unfortunately, the Sender ID Framework is somewhat underexposed. This is a shame, because it works very well. With this blog I hope to bring the Sender ID Framework to your attention. Are you an administrator of an e-mail server, are you responsible for inbound and outbound communication for you company or are you using e-mail in other way, then I highly recommend you to read this blog. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Exchange, Microsoft Tagged With: Anti-SPAM, Exchange, Sender ID, Sender Policy Framework, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

Troubleshoot NICs (left behind in registry)

March 11, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp 4 Comments

Symptoms:

At customers I have noticed that sometimes problems occur with network interfaces in Windows, either physical or virtual network interfaces. Having one or more of the following symptoms:

  • A static IP Address cannot be used because (accoring to Windows) it is already in use. But there is no sign of a NIC with that specific IP Address.
  • A static Default Gateway on the TCP/IP properties of your NIC is lost after reboot or directly after you apply the TCP/IP settings.
  • The label “Local Area Network 2” or “Ethernet 2” cannot be renamed to “Local Area Network” or “Ethernet” because (according to Windows) that name already exists.
  • A network interface is detected and shown in Device Manager as <interface-name> #2, whereas it is the only interface.

These symptoms occur when settings are left behind in the registry. Which is often caused by human error, incorrectly removing a NIC (Network Interface Card) interface, or using an OS image on another machine. Of course there is no one to blame, what seems so simple is sometimes overlooked. Troubleshooting these symptoms can take a lot of time. But in fact they are quit easy to solve. With this blog I hope to make you aware about what you should (not) do when removing or re-adding a NIC. And if you encounter such symptoms, how to solve it.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Windows Tagged With: Device Manager, Load Balancing and Failover, Network Interface Card, NIC Team, Team NIC

My first FlexPod! (Part 2 – Hardware Overview)

March 2, 2015 By Boudewijn Plomp 7 Comments

This is part 2 of the following blog series:

  • My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 2 – Hardware Overview)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 3 – Hardware Configuration)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 4 – Quality of Services)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)

Hardware Overview:

If you have read part 1 you should now know a bit more about a Cisco FlexPod. As mentioned, a Cisco FlexPod is a reference architecture and can be combined with any hardware you want, which makes is very flexible and scalable. With the budget at that time we started with the following hardware infrastructure:

Cisco FlexPod (hardware overview)

Altough this pictures might look nice to you, it is quite useless if you don’t know what it is all about. So I have to give you some detailed information about the hardware and it’s capabilities. I am afraid this is going to be a long blog. But hey, let’s go for it! 🙂  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cisco, Unified Computing System Tagged With: Cisco ASA, Cisco FlexPod, Cisco Nexus, Cisco UCS, Cisco VIC, Converged Network Adapter, vHBA, vNIC

Recent Blogs:

  • How-to fix the Downloaded Maps Broker (MapsBroker) warning
  • Useful links for Microsoft Azure
  • SkyKick Cloud Backup (for Office 365)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 4 – Quality of Services)
  • My first FlexPod! (Part 3 – Hardware Configuration)

Catagories:

  • Cisco (6)
    • Unified Computing System (6)
  • Microsoft (8)
    • Azure (1)
    • Exchange (1)
    • Hyper-V (2)
    • Office 365 (1)
    • System Center (1)
    • Windows (2)
  • SkyKick (1)
    • SkyKick Cloud Backup (1)
  • Uncategorized (1)

Tags:

Anti-SPAM Azure Cisco Cisco ASA Cisco FlexPod Cisco Nexus Cisco UCS Cisco VIC Converged Network Adapter Device Manager Exchange Hyper-V Load Balancing and Failover MapsBroker Microsoft NetApp Network Interface Card NIC Team Office 365 Quality of Services Sender ID Sender Policy Framework Services Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SkyKick Cloud Backup System Center System Center Operations Manager System Center Virtual Machine Manager Team NIC UCS Manager UCS PowerTool Suite vHBA vNIC Windows

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