Archive for SBS 2003
Small Business Server 2003 – Backup Status Hangs on Loading…
Posted by: | CommentsHad a customer report a problem today with the Small Business Server Managment console not being able to show the status of the backups and just hanging at “Loading…”
Visiting the backup URL manually ( http://localhost/backup/default.aspx ) enabled me to see the backup reports as normal. Had a quick look in the code of default.htm which is the page that the “Manage Small Business Server Backup” console loads and saw that it is really just a javascript redirect.
Turns out that this server had scripting disabled for the intranet zone and therefore the page redirection was never happening.
Once scripting was enabled again the backup console started working as expected. Couldn’t find mention of anyone else having this problem so thought I would post.
Using packet capture to find virus infected clients
Posted by: | CommentsToday a customer started to get a lot of their e-mails bounced. In fact they could not even e-mail me to let me know about the problem as my own mail servers were rejecting their messages.
The reason for this was because their IP address had been listed on the CBL.
I had a poke around the server and everything seemed to be in good order; patched up to date, virus scanner had nothing interesting to report, netstat did not show any abnormal connections and Exchange queues seemed normal. So I assumed that the problem must be coming from one of the network PCs.
This customer has a dual nic SBS 2003 Standard edition server, not my preferred set-up, but the system had to be implemented in this way to fit in with existing infrastructure. It is not possible to see what traffic is passing through the NAT gateway on RRAS with the built in tools, but Microsoft Netmon 3.1 should be able to show up any strange network traffic. I installed it and ran the following filter:
Tcp.dstport == 25 and ipv4.Address != 192.168.200.1
192.168.200.1 is the IP address of the internet facing NIC on the SBS machine.
Within a couple of minutes this filter showed all the machines on the network sending SMTP based traffic except for the SBS server itself. Fortunately there was only one. I took remote control of the machine and from the command line ran:
netstat -ano |find ?��Ǩ?�:25?��Ǩ�?
The output of this command showed me the local processes which were attempting to communicate with other hosts on port 25 and gave me confirmation that this PC was definitely infected with some kind of mass mailing virus or worm. Killing the process listed by the netstat command stopped the mass mailer and gave some breathing space to find the cause of the problem.
Turns out the machine in question had its virus checker disabled. So I turned it back on and ran a full scan which turned up almost 6,000 files infected with W32/MyDoom.
Once the problem had been found it was easy to sort, but because I have so few customers with this set-up it had not occurred to me how little visibility you get over network traffic with the SBS 2003 standard edition tools.
The joys of travelling sales laptops 
The ISMTPOnArrival_OnArrival event sink in Exchange 2003 can be used to trigger code to perform various tasks. I have recently used this method to strip attachments from messages and then FTP them to a remote machine, based on the message subject and recipient.
In this, more basic example the entire message is saved to the filesystem in .eml format to a folder specified within a variable. The script could be made much more elaborate with the addition of a couple of arrays to specify multiple subjects/locations. The idea is that you could setup a system where e-mails can be automatically filed without having to depend on user intevention and avoiding the requirement for 3rd party software.
This can be implemented by following the example from this Microsoft Knowlegbase article. The file referred to in the article called SMTPREG.VBS can be found here on MSDN. Instead of the SMTPMsgCheck.vbs file referenced in the article create a file called SMTPSubjectCheck.vbs and insert the following code(you will also need to modify the registration batch file accordingly) :
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript">
Sub IEventIsCacheable_IsCacheable()
'To implement the interface, and return S_OK implicitly
End Sub
Sub ISMTPOnArrival_OnArrival(ByVal Msg, EventStatus )
Dim Pos, SubjectToFind, SaveFolder, MsgStream
SubjectToFind="Project1"
SaveFolder="c:\\"
Pos=InStr(1,Msg.Subject,SubjectToFind,1)
if Pos <> 0 then
set MSGStream= Msg.Getstream
SaveFile=SaveFolder & Msg.Senton & "-" & msg.subject & ".eml"
SaveFile=Replace(SaveFile, "/", "_")
SaveFile=Replace(SaveFile, " ", "_")
SaveFile=Replace(SaveFile, ":", "_",3)
MsgStream.SaveToFile savefile,2
MsgStream.Close
Set MsgStream = Nothing
End if
End Sub
</SCRIPT>
In this example the script is looking for a subject line that contains the text “project1″(not case sensitive) and saving it to the root of c:
I have attached a zip file to the blog post with all the required files in one zip file, just be cautious of using it if you already have event sinks registered(drop the files into c:\eventsink).
subjectcheck.zip
Exchange 2003 SP2 IMF Keyword Manager
Posted by: | CommentsExchange 2003 sp2 comes with an updated intelligent message filter. One of the new features of the updated IMF is the ability to add a custom weighting file that gives administrators more control over incoming mail.
I have used this file a few times on customers systems, usually to allow certain automated e-mails through the IMF which were being incorrectly identified as spam.
The problem is that Microsoft have not included a GUI to edit the MSExchange.UceContentFilter.xml file. ?Ǭ�So it must be generated by hand, and while this isn’t difficult, it is not very convenient and it is easy to make a mistake.
I was looking for an excuse to have a play with Visual Basic 2005 and so I have made a little utility to make creating and managing the MSExchange.UceContentFilter.xml a little easier.
Becomes….
The utility can be downloaded from here.(Requires .net 2.0).
If you need more information on how to implement the custom weighting feature then see:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Release Notes
Microsoft Exchange Server Intelligent Message Filter v2 Operations Guide