Post #422,987
3/22/18 9:16:54 PM
3/22/18 9:16:54 PM
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Only one of my clients is big enough for that.
For the rest of them, hiring me at $100 / hour when needed is still one hell of a lot cheaper than having a techie on payroll.
Fortunately, the main reason for smaller companies to have a permanent techie went away some years back.
For a while Microsoft was graduating a lot of hot shot techies who went into small businesses and sold them the whole Microsoft business suit, including Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory. Fortunately, all those Exchange Servers have died off long ago.
I have only one client now using Exchange Server, and he outsources it to a company that does have full time techies 24 hours a day. I can't recall any of my clients having active directory any more.
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Post #422,997
3/23/18 8:00:07 AM
3/23/18 8:00:07 AM
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Suit instead of suite? Was that intentional? If so, I like it. :0)
I was a Microsoftie in those days and occasionally made a little money un-fscking some of those very "Small Business Server" installations you're referring to myself. bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #423,002
3/23/18 12:33:15 PM
3/23/18 12:33:15 PM
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A fun thing about Microsoft Exchange Server.
At least back when I had to deal with it, Exchange Server generated huge amounts of .tmp files, so many it saturated the hard disks of the day.
Simple - you just go into that directory and delete all the .tmp files.
Ha! Ha! gotchya! One of those .tmp files is essential, and if removed Exchange Server will never run again! All your email is inaccessible (IMAP was little used back then).
When this happened to one of my clients, I turned the problem over to an exchange specialist. They didn't even try, they just set him up with a regular hosted POP account.
This partially explains why most of those Exchange Servers in small businesses disappeared.
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Post #423,004
3/23/18 1:31:03 PM
3/23/18 1:31:03 PM
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Another fun thing.
I had a client (this was a long time ago) who'd first installed Exchange 4.x or 5.0 as part of one of those Small Business Server suites. They wanted to upgrade to a full Exchange 5.5 (IIRC) stand alone server. I quoted 4 hours to do the job (chiefly because I never quoted anything less than 4 hours and all my work then was always NTE). The client balked. I told him that if he was going to have his help desk tech do it, make sure he's careful because, for instance, the default for the upgrade is to set the server up as an open relay and they had their exchange server outside the firewall. I was told it wouldn't be a problem because "we're just a little company. No one will know we're on the Internet." Then, two weeks later, the same guy called me in a panic. He said he'd been "interviewed by FBI agents who were interested in all the child porn that was arriving in Australia or somewhere" that had bounced off their exchange server. That mess took me *and* my partner a while to clean up. bcnu,
Mikem
It's mourning in America again.
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Post #423,005
3/23/18 1:39:39 PM
3/23/18 1:39:39 PM
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Yeah, I ran into the open relay problem myself.
Fortunately, not much damage was done - just their Internet service provider cut them off.
More fortunately, I didn't install that Exchange Server so they couldn't blame me. It was a hassle to fix.
Later their Exchange Server bombed and had to be re-installed. Unfortunately, they didn't remember their company code, which means none of their email could be accessed.
After some study, I found a severe security flaw in Exchange Server that allowed me to extract the company code. I published that on the Internet and got a few emails of thanks for all the time I'd saved for administrators.
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Post #423,007
3/23/18 1:54:41 PM
3/23/18 1:54:41 PM
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Systems guys at the law firm I worked at *turned off* the firewall
They were Windows guys through-and-through. Our ISP had provided a Solaris box that sat in our server room between our network and the world. Or it sat there until they decided that since they didn't know what it was doing it must not be needed so when upgrading some switches they left the yellow box out of the loop.
Shortly thereafter our clients started reporting that they weren't getting email that our attorneys said they had sent. A little investigation showed their systems were bouncing it because our domain had been blacklisted for spam. We were an open relay.
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Post #423,006
3/23/18 1:51:11 PM
3/23/18 1:51:11 PM
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The flaw in "safety by obscurity"
The bad guys can presume that a small company using that strategy doesn't have skilled enough support staff to understand the vulnerabilities and fix them. This makes them prime targets.
I've had a couple of clients asking me why their server hard disks were full.
I had one client telling me all the computers I'd supplied were way too slow and needed a serious upgrade. Problem was, those computers were working very hard - but they were working for someone other than the owners.
Yeah, obscurity is an open invitation.
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