I’m a big scary IT contractor now, working for a relatively small Texas-based company on a contract for the USDA. It’s pretty awesome, and I’ve learned all kinds of things since I started here. One of the cooler tools made available to us is Microsoft System Center, which allows for a single application to manage a huge variety of tasks, including pushing updates to users, working with virtual servers, and installing software remotely. It also has an awesome remote control feature that allows working on a customer’s machine without having to log them out and use regular RDP (remote desktop).

I had the client console installed, but it never worked, mostly because my user account wasn’t in the right domain group, so I didn’t have access rights to connect to the MSC server. Then it turned out that I had a typo in my server hostname, which was causing the SCCM application to crash every single time I loaded it.

Since I couldn’t get the application to stay open long enough to rename the server it was connecting to by default, I figured I’d just uninstall it, which would (theoretically) wipe out any settings that had been created for the application.

Not so.

I mean, really, Microsoft, really? It’s just good manners to take any registry edits and config files with you when your application’s uninstaller is used.

It turns out that I had to search through the registry for the bad server name, rename it, and presto! My client console works perfectly. If you’re having a similar issue, the server string is located in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ConfigMgr\Admin UI\MRU\DefaultSite. Change ServerName to whatever the correct name is, and you should be back in business.

Maybe the System Center 2012 client uninstaller will actually, you know, uninstall everything.

I run a Windows Server 2008 R2 box at home, primarily for hosting small multiplayer online games and various websites. While Server 2008 is built on the same foundation as Windows 7, there are quite a few differences.

I finally upgraded my main desktop to Windows 7 Ultimate tonight and discovered that my server was no longer showing up under the “Network” view in Windows Explorer. It turns out that in Windows 7, that view (which used to be called Network Neighborhood in the Windows NT/98 days and My Network Places in Windows XP) depends on a service called Network Discovery to find machines attached to your network. For the multiple machines on my LAN running Windows 7, they display in my Homegroup and Network views perfectly fine. Server 2008, however, has Network Discovery disabled by default, likely as a security precaution.

Of course, when I remoted into my server and tried to enable Network Discovery, imagine my surprise when it kept re-disabling itself! A little googling revealed in this forum post that Network Discovery relies on several Windows Services to function properly. Getting everything set up is surprisingly easy.

The following services should be set to Automatic (some may be set to Manual; others may be entirely Disabled):

• Function Discovery Resource Publication
• SSDP Discovery
• UPnP Device Host

Once you’ve set up these services to start automatically (and made sure they’re started!), you can enable Network Discovery in the Network and Sharing Center’s advanced sharing settings view. Once you save your changes, your Server 2008 machine should show up in the Network view of your Windows 7 computers.

I’ve been gone for awhile. I mean, not really, just from A Better Geek. I met a special someone, so that took up a lot of my time. Then said Special Someone got a job with IBM in Virginia, and we packed up and moved 700 miles to Fairfax from Lafayette back in mid-September 2009. I’m looking for work and spending my time being a server administrator, because we decided to go for Verizon Business FiOS and are hosting everything (including our websites) from our home.

Let me tell you, this has been one huge educational experience that never seems to end. My server is now running my LAN’s internal DHCP and DNS. It’s also a game application server, an internal samba file server, and an internal and external web server.

One of the things apps like WordPress, PunBB, and other content systems use is email. I’ve already discussed in the past how to make sendmail in Linux play nicely with Apache and PHP, but I realized that things were changing as I started migrating our websites and projects to an entirely different environment – Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and IIS 7.0. There are some growing pains, but at least it gives me a lot to write about!

Anyhow, I realized shortly after the migration of Dan’s game servers (and related websites) that the server wasn’t sending mail. Since, you know, I hadn’t set up an SMTP service in Windows. “So what?” I thought to myself, “I’ll just install it and everything will be hunky-dory, right?”

Wrong.

It turns out that in 2009, every large mail service provider on the Internet really hates relaying email that comes from suspicious locations, including IP addresses that are part of residential ISPs. Even though we have a static IP address through Verizon Business, it’s still part of Verizon’s greater IP pool – which includes all their dynamic IPs for residential FiOS and DSL services.

Google blacklisted me the second I tried to send a message to an @gmail.com address. It was just downhill from there. I found out from some people on IRC that I needed a reverse DNS entry if I wanted anyone to relay my email, so I called up Verizon and got that taken care of. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL started relaying my mail, but Google kept delaying delivery, claiming that an “unusual amount of unsolicited email” was coming from my IP address.

After many hours on IRC and doing additional research on Google, I decided it probably wasn’t worth it to keep wrestling to make the big mail servers of cyberspace deem my rinky-dink little server worthy of their approval. It was time to look for other solutions.

I decided right from the start that I did not want to deal with hosting mail. I have no interest in trying to mitigate mass quantities of spam. My friend Julie over The Gadgeteer got on the Gmail Apps boat and moved her own email over to Google. It seemed appealing enough, so I decided to give it a shot. Google Apps offers a free version to cheapskates like me who can’t or don’t want to pay yet another monthly fee. The free version includes Google mail, calendar, sites, chat, and docs. Works for me!

Google was brilliant about the whole thing. I signed up, and when I clicked in the web-based control panel to set up email, it automagically discovered that my domain (polatrite.com, in this case) was registered with 1and1.com, so it directed me to a 1and1-specific how-to on setting up the MX records for my domain. About 18 hours later, 1and1 and Google had both updated their servers and records, and I was in business. Now it was time to figure out how to make my web server send email through Google’s SMTP servers.

Which is why we’re here today. If you’re still paying attention, that is. As always, this is a little screenshot-heavy, so hit the jump to carry onward.

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