Today’s class covered security techniques to use when securing your Exchange servers.
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Today, we covered chapter 8, the chapter on SMTP. Then we went home!
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Today we talked about chapter 7, virtual servers. Virtual servers, in the context of Exchange, refers to the services that are running on that physical server, such as POP3, IMAP, NNTP, etc. It is possible to stop, start and restart those servers independently of the physical server, which makes the entire network infrastructure more stable.
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Just the midterm exam! That’s it!
And I’m sure some inappropriate jokes were made today too.
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Today we covered Chapters 5 and 6, dealing with Recipient Objects and Address Lists and Public Folders respectively.
Recipient objects are just fancy ways of saying people or things that can get mail. These can include AD users, AD groups, outside contacts (think people who don’t work at your company), and public folders (next chapter).
After discussing the handling of recipient objects, we moved on to discussing the day-to-day activities of managing e-mail boxes (using the Exchange Tasks context menu item) and that discussion led us to group types and scopes. Remember in previous classes talking about the two types of groups: security and distribution groups, and how we only use distribution groups to organize users for communication, but almost always, we’ll set up a security group? Well, here we are in Exchange class, and now is the time we’ll be using Distribution groups. Note that security groups can also be mail-enabled, so it’s still possible that you’ll never have a distribution group even if you’re using Exchange. To wind things up for this chapter, we discussed recipient policies.
The next chapter covered Public Folders. Public folders basically work like private, enterprise-wide (if you want them to be) newsgroups. Think of it as a bulletin board for your users to use for communication. Honestly, Sharepoint or Google Wave could be more useful in some settings, but it’s here. A great use of this would be for your HR department to have access to a folder where they can upload employee handbooks, employee policies, etc, for everyone to see on a Read Only basis. To use public folders, you must have the NNTP service running.
A nice thing about Public Folders is that they can be configured to be accessible from a web browser. We accomplish this by setting up a Virtual Directory for the folder and then IIS takes over and makes the information available on the web server that is hosting the directory.
You may have noticed that today’s content is a little deeper than what we had originally planned. I will be out all of next week, and so to stay on track, we doubled up today. Next week, there will be a midterm exam that will cover Chapters 01-06. You of course will be allowed to use your textbooks for the exam. After you finish the test next week, you’ll be free to go. When I get back the week after, we’ll hit the ground running for Chapter 7.
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Today’s class covered chapter four, the chapter on making sure your Exchange servers have fault tolerance — because no one likes it when the e-mail server is down. Ok, actually I do because that means that I’m unreachable for a few minutes. Woo!
Anyway, we looked at two main ways of protecting our messaging capabilties — one way was setting up our servers in a cluster, the other was implementing a front-end Exchange server.
Let’s talk about clustering. What clustering does is combine two or more physical boxes into one network node. This combined network node has the power of all of the boxes, but appears to be one single node on the network. If one of the physical boxes goes down for hardware failure or repair or updates, etc., the other boxes are still available and therefore the node is still available. There are two types of clustering we talked about: Network Load Balancing and the Microsoft Clustering Service. NLB isn’t as robust as Microsoft Clustering Service, but it isn’t as picky either: you can mix/match Windows Server operating systems and drive types and you’re ok. With the Cluster service, you have to have SCSI drives not running in an array and not be encrypted, etc. Also, no more than 8 nodes (NLB allows for 32). So for our limited hardware purposes, we played with the Network Load Balancing.
The other method we can use in conjunction with clustering is the concept of a Front End server. When we configure a Front End server, we are basically taking away the mailboxes and other important data that might be sitting on a server and moving them to a separate Exchange server, which is configured as a Back-End Server. The Front End server is designed to be at the Front End of the network, the part that interfaces with the Internet (scary place) and is therefore more susceptible to attack. Since it’s more susceptible to attack, we want to move the goods off of it. Exchange Servers are set up as back end servers by default.
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In today’s class, we covered chapter 3, which gives us a basic tour of the Exchange System Manager.
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Welcome to Exchange class!
To begin, we covered a chapter which reiterates the basics of AD. Exchange is just a *touch* more complicated than installing, say, Office, and so a good understanding of AD concepts is important. Afterwards, we briefly looked at the protocols and mechanisms that Exchange uses on a network.
The second chapter we covered actually looked at Exchange the program itself. Or, what it takes to install the program. Before we even crack the plastic on our installation disc, we need to make sure the following items have been taken care of: ASP.net, .NET Framework, WWW, SMTP and NNTP (I hope you remember what all of those things stand for!).
Once those services and frameworks have been taken care of, we need to go ahead and prepare our forests and appropriate domains for installation. The forest comes first, and we prepare it by running the Exchange setup utility with the /forestprep switch. This takes a while. After that’s finished, we do the same thing for our domain by running the /domainprep switch against the setup program.
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