Imagine my annoyance when I was greeted with a glaring red light upon my monitoring dashboard this morning. “One of my servers low on disk space?!”, I exclaimed with incredulity. Upon further inspection it turns out that some errant program has generated 25 gb of temporary files of the format PBD????.tmp. A little bit of digging around and discovered that the Trend Micro Antivirus was responsible for this disreputable behavior.
I proceeded to shut down the service, purge the rogue temp files and restart the service. No more errant temporary files.

It seems that this happens when a Trend update is performed and the services are not restarted afterwards. Consider this yet another reason why you should always restart your processes after an update.

I get frequent requests from my loyal hordes for ways to remotely manage the processes in their own fiefdoms. In a previous article I mentioned Remote Task Manager which is an excellent tool for complete remote management, but requires a client to be installed on your target system. If you don’t have the option of installing a client, or need a more immediate solution then you’re in luck. Read on for the sweet sweet resolution.
Read the rest of this entry »

So upon walking into my office the other day I noticed a laptop sitting open on my bench with the word FAIL spelled out in ASCII art on the screen. Upon further reading I discovered that the system had “Failed to Nobulate” and needed to be rebooted. A system reboot resulted in the same message. At this point I thought what anyone would think when confronted with such a nonsensical error message, “I’m being pranked.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the long delay, occasionally the many demands that life makes on a person with my varied skills overrun the amount of time available in the day and my dialogue with my loyal subjects suffers. To make up for that lapse I have three tasty pieces of knowledge to impart. The first you will receive today, then next two will come in due time.

As occasionally happens I recently ran into an Exchange server which has been violated by a cretinous spammer of one variety or another and is being forced to spew mail out into the world like a drunken hobo shouting his lunch at the curb. The most annoying side effect of this is that it creates hundreds of separate mail queues with hundreds of messages in each one. Emptying them all out can be quite cumbersome, but I have a shortcut for you.

The simplest and fastest way to purge your outgoing mail queue of unwanted detritus is to journey to X:\program files\exchsrvr\mailroot\vsi 1\queue\ where X of course is the drive letter of your exchange installation. Now a simple Ctrl-A, Delete will remove forever the fruits of your potential spammers labor and free your mail server of its burden. Just be sure to close whatever mis-configured relay allowed the spammer to hijack your system in the first place, or you’ll be doing this every week.