One of the most awaited (and misunderstood) features added to Exchange Server 2010 is the disaster-recovery/high-availability feature known as the Database Availability Group (DAG.) Microsoft touts it as a perfected “2.0″ of the heretofore painful database replication process known as Continuous Cluster Replication (CCR,) which came into our lives in Exchange 2007. While the DAG does create a much simpler implementation path for administrators, there are some important design considerations that have the potential to create deep, painful “catches and gotchas.” Continue reading Reliable Exchange 2010 DAG: Part 1, Active Directory Health
Recently, I setup a new Cisco ASA for a customer who is stuck using a cable-modem in their office. Their particular ISP assigns a DHCP address to all clients, and makes that IP sticky to the MAC Address it is initially assigned to. If a different MAC address requests an IP through that modem, it is assigned a different address.
Since this customer’s public mail-exchanger is hosted at this address, if the IP changes, e-mail will stop arriving until we resolve the situation. To prevent this I configured the ASA to present the MAC address from the existing router when it made its initial DHCP request to the cable-company.
Continue reading How To: Configure MAC Address on Cisco ASA WAN Interface