Me Blog!

I managed to completely screw up my home Active Directory. I managed this by way of a botched installation of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 which failed to extend my schema as it was corrupted somewhere along the line. Of course as is usual for me, this provided yet another opportunity to overhaul my home network and get a few things that have been niggling me out of the way.

Luckily with Active Directory you don’t need to reinstall the server OS if things go awry. It is just a matter of removing the current active directory installation, rebooting and recreating it again. But, and there is always a but where Microsoft seem to be concerned, every desktop and server will lose their accounts in the directory and will need to be added again. So before you set about doing so, it is vital to back up any user data you have on desktops, laptops etc.

Seeing as I would be removing my main workstation from AD I figured it would be a good time to reinstall the OS as it was getting a bit bloated with loads of crud added to it over the years. I never thought I would say this about Windows but the installation of XP was the very same one that the machine came with two years ago. I never had to reinstall it and likely wouldn’t need to either only for I actually wanted to.

As the PC has a RAID controller and I have two identical 160GB Seagate SATA disks lying about I figured it would be worth a complete re-install with the disks in a RAID 0 array for a bit of a performance boost.

While XP was setting itself up I reconfigured my AD which went nicely. Then recreated various user accounts and sorted out various permissions on shares. (two houses across the road connect to my file servers, don’t ask!) By the time XP was up and running with updates installed it was now time to turn my attention to my second 2003 server. I had a plan in mind for that so the OS was reinstalled and on went Exchange 2003 and Sharepoint and related patches and updates.

If you have read Kieran’s blog entry about the difficulties he was having with his ISP connecting to my site, the problem was actually to do with my DNS setup and more specifically my firewall configuration. As I was doing plenty of changes about the place I reconfigured my public DNS server and placed it in a DMZ ahead of my firewall. Hopefully this should fix the problems that were arising.

Next I set about installing Office 2007 SP1. I have to say that I like it quite a lot. The new UI is quite refreshing and after a few minutes poking about it becomes second nature rather quickly. Outlook 2007 now supports RSS feeds too so that is a welcome addition. I’ve only just begun to look at all the new features but so far so good.

My Linux machines I’m happy to say, I didn’t really have to touch. With all my messing about they performed happily although I did take the opportunity to ensure that all updates had been applied.

All that’s left for me to do is setup my media server which I think is something that I will get around to tomorrow. This machine had been out of action for a while after a motherboard failure but Dell replaced it on Monday for me so time for it to go back into use.

For those wondering how I managed to find the time to do all this today? I have a chest infection again and I was barred from going anywhere near Lucas Hard to believe he is a month old already!