I just started a new job (after being fired the last day of my honeymoon from another company), and one of my tasks was to get people with iPhones the ability to sync with the Exchange server. IMAP and POP were already opened up, but those aren’t actually using Activesync abilities. I wanted push and not pull technology!

After working with Exchange 2007 for so long it takes a little time to get used to 2003 again. So bear with me.

Open up the Exchange System Manager
Under Global Settings, right click on Mobile Services and select Properties

Make sure that you select the bottom two check boxes.

Then, on your ISA server, you must create the rule to allow mobile outlook access to:
/*
You may already have something like /exchange/*, /owa/* etc, but you do need the entire directory to be allowed access.

Here’s the scenario:
Customer has a syslog server (Kiwi’s free syslog server) running on Windows2003 Server on a crappy 100GB server. They wanted a way to rotate the logs (free version does not allow for automatic rotation) and compress the logs. Every hour the syslog file grows by 7MB. That might not seem like a lot, but each month that’s 5.2GB and every year it’s 61GB. OK, maybe that’s not a lot to you, but on a 100GB server it adds up quickly.

I compressed a test log of 46MB. It compressed to 8KB. Wow, eh? 7Zip is free, you can download it using sourceforge so it’ll run on Windows or linux.

I wrote up a batch file to auto grab, compress, and name the file after the date. You’ll need to add the 7z variable to the system path to make things easier (system variables, under path add C:\program files\7-zip)

@echo off
7z a c:/%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%-%date:~10,4%-syslog.7z c:/test/
pause

As a breakdown, the first line turns off writing the commands on the executed script window.
7z is the executable, a is add files, the date spits out month-day-year followed by -syslog.7z, c:/test/ is the path you want compressed
Pause just makes it so you have to hit enter to close the command window

Obviously change the c:/test/ to something you want to backup. You can also use c:/test/test.jpg as a specific file name.

After installing Perl, Awstats, IIS6.0 and all the available Windows Updates on a system, I mapped drive shares on several other webservers. I mean, why install perl and awstats on each individual server when I can have a virtual machine ready and waiting and have no downtime on the production sites?

So I had the batch script file setup to update the stats every 5 minutes for 24 hours of every day (288 updates a day):

@echo off
cd C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\awstats\cgi-bin
awstats.pl -config=myconfig -update

I saved it as Test.bat, opened up the batch file to test it out and it ran AND updated perfectly. Yay, that wasn’t too difficult.

But then I created an automated task in Windows. Run it every 5 minutes. Error 0x1 every time. WTF??

It’s because “Perl is an interpreted language, and you cannot define a task priority or a maximum CPU usage value when you run a Perl program” (thanks Devx.com!). You have to start the command first.

So the finished code should look like this:
@echo off
cd C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\awstats\cgi-bin
start awstats.pl -config=myconfig -update

Try to run it again, works when just opening the BAT file. Then try it automated. 0x0!