Well, it has been a while since I posted.  But that is due to a variety of fun factors!

1.  I caught a wonderful sinus infection that migrated to my chest

2.  Our SBS server suffered what I would consider a catastrophic hardware failure of ALL 3 drives in our RAID 5 array (I have every intention now of picking up another two drives in a few months and swapping 2 of the 4 drives that will be in the RAID 10 array out).

3.  Re-configuring the server after said disaster (due to our backups failing as well….I felt like a winner, I tell ya!

Anyways, the good news out of the whole thing is, I’ve gotten the configuration for a number of pieces right from the start this time and the problem areas are ones I’m trying to work out probably affect a large number of people.

A major problem I resolved today was DNS was taking FOREVER to resolve and was actually causing ISA’s proxy to spit out errors about not being able to resolve the DNS address for sites I know work.  As it turns out, after I did some internet searching, this can happen when you use the Configure E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard (a.k.a. CEICW) and actually insert the DNS servers for your ISP.  If you leave the two boxes blank, with no IPs in them, you will receive a warning prompt that the server will instead use Root Hints to resolve domain names.  It seems to think this is a bad thing….but it works wonders!

Now websites resolve quickly and applications aren’t freaking out when they need to reach the internet (GFI Email Essentials, yes, I’m eyeing you!)

Next up: Wrangling the ISA Microsoft Desktop Engine’s memory leak.