How to identify your SQL Server version and edition
The short version is that you need to run either of the following queries in SQL Management Studio (Express):
1. SELECT @@VERSION
2. SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(’productversion’), SERVERPROPERTY (’productlevel’), SERVERPROPERTY (’edition’)
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\ReservedPorts
Above is the registry key that needs tweaked in order to reserve a TCP port. This will protect this port from any inadvertent randomn future assignment by software, patch, or service as what has happened over this past week with the DNS patch.
Posted in Registry, Windows 2008, Windows Server 2003, XP
Today I saw a huge amount of “current sessions” in the SMTP Virtual Server of Exchange 2003 on a SBS 2003 server. These sessions had connection time values exceeding 180,000 seconds (50 hours). Wow! Well I just right clicked and terminated but that didn’t address the root cause. The consensus on this is that a directory harvest attack is being perpetrated. At the time this server was configured to wait 10 seconds before sending 5.x.x error responses (tar pit feature). Now I’ve increased that to 30 seconds in hopes of seeing this be reduced. If not I may have to either drop the back up mail server or switch to one that does recipient filtering. After researching this I found two resources I want to record.
Microsoft has a nice article elaborating on much more than merely directory harvest attacks and explains the pros and cons of these tools. This is critical since there are tangible consequences whenever changing the server filtering behaviors.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842851
Next is a conversation discussing the root causes I had seen and why the tar pit value comes into play:
This should work nicely for those that want to wait to deploy XP SP3 a little longer but need to connect to Server 2008 TS Remote App. Link is at the bottom of brief overview.
Description of the Remote Desktop Connection 6.1 client update for Terminal Services in Windows XP Service Pack 2
View products that this article applies to.
Article ID: 952155
Last Review: June 24, 2008
Revision: 2.1
INTRODUCTION
This article discusses the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) 6.1 client update that helps you use the new Terminal Services features. These features are introduced in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008 and are available from a computer that is running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Posted in Virtualization, Windows 2008, XP
Ealier in June I had blogged about the subject of Greylisting as raised by a colleague. Since then I have taken a curious interest in the Anti-Spam technique which takes advantage of SPAM’ers lack of RFC compliance at the MTA level. Here are some new resources I’ve discoverd including a great post by a great Exchange MVP who uses SBS, Daniel Petri:
Posted in Exchange, SPAM | Tags: greylisting
My tree at Carbon Grove
