Brien M. Posey

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, Is a Server Cluster Right for Your Organization? and Choosing the Cluster Type that’s Right For You , I explained about the two different types of server clusters in Windows 2000. In this article, I’ll discuss the issues involved in planning a network […]

A portion of my article Color-Coding Messages and Setting the Rules mentions applying rules that can act upon incoming e-mail messages. For example, you can set up a rule that will automatically delete spam from known senders. You can set up another rule to move certain types of messages to specific folders […]

In part 1 of this article series, Taming your Exchange Databases , I explain how you can reduce the load on your Exchange server while increasing its reliability by automatically moving all inbound messages into personal folders. Although this technique will save space on your Exchange server, your personal folder server will quickly fill […]

In many companies, e-mail has quickly become a critical application. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon to see private information store files on Exchange servers reach several gigabytes in size. Unfortunately, although Exchange 5.5 is supposed to be a scalable application, it has some inherent problems that you might encounter when Exchange databases grow […]

One of the greatest features of Windows 2000 is the way that it lets you automatically distribute applications to end users. You can do this several different ways, and any good Windows 2000 book can provide you with a comprehensive set of instructions for getting the job done. However, as a close friend recently found […]

CrossLinks CrossNodes article–Understanding the differences between public key and symmetric key encryption CrossNodes article–Windows 2000 security-enabled protocols Several years ago, Microsoft introduced the NTFS file system. The idea was to create a file system that would protect files on the local hard disk from prying eyes. Unless a users have the proper permissions, they can’t […]

In the article ” Working with certificates in Windows 2000 , I discuss some ways that you can manage certificates on your local machine. Managing local certificates can be a crucial task in some situations. However, it’s much more common to work with certificates at the server level. In this series of articles, I’ll discuss […]

In the article ” Understanding the IPSec protocol ,” I explain how the IPSec policy is used within Windows 2000 to secure confidential communications across networks. Like most security systems, it has several settings you can use to control the way security is enforced. The primary way is through security policies. In this article, I’ll […]

When it comes to working with remote storage, many administrators have a false sense of security. After all, we’ve always been taught that if it’s on tape, it must be safe. Remember that a remote storage tape functions differently from a backup tape. Remote storage tapes are constantly being overwritten and are usually constantly available […]

In the first article of this series, ” Designing an Active Directory naming scheme ,” I discuss the importance of using a well-organized naming structure in developing your Active Directory layout. When you build an Active Directory from the ground up, you must consider more than simply what names to use for the various directory […]

Have you ever wished that you could know exactly what’s going on on your network? If so, the tool of choice is often a protocol analyzer. A protocol analyzer can help you to see if your encryption is working correctly, or if a particular PC is flooding the network with bad packets. Many times, though, […]

If you’d like to learn more about fully qualified domain names in large organizations, an excellent poster comes with the Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit. This poster illustrates the concepts that I’ve discussed in this article in an easy-to-follow format. Several years ago, I worked for a company that started its network with a single […]