So what! I here you say, well firstly it gives us the ability to increase the information store from 16GB to 75 Gb in size which has to be welcome as I am sure a lot of us and our customers are coming close to the 16GB limit.

The update also includes support for SenderID http://tinyurl.com/8gbq4which could potentially give us a decent tool to limit if not prevent someone spoofing a mail from our/your smtp domain.

Hands up how many of us are getting automated emails from Anti Virus software stating that a mail which we never sent contained a virus.

Good deed for today, please convince all those sys admins you know to turn off the email response that most AV products send to the sender of an infected mail because let's be honest in most cases the email address is spoofed.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

APC Java issue causes Services to Hang

Thanks to Rob for this one.

Believe it or not the APC software usually version 6.x of Powerchute which a lot of IT shops run which provides the monitoring function for the UPS can cause a Windows Server to be become extremely unstable.

Basically the problem stems from an issue with the Sun java runtime which causes an event ID 7022 Service unresponsive.

Basically if you have a Windows 2000 / 2003 server that is extremely unresponsive before you suspect DNS / Active Directory or any other core service just check if are running a version of Powerchute prior to Version 7 and this just might be your issue.

As I was browsing for something else I came across Mark Wilson's great blog http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/ and a very detailed posting on how he resolved the issue