Sunday, 11 December 2011

Windows 2008 Event Logs Filling Disk

I recently found my Windows Server 2008 domain controllers were rapidly running out of disk space.  Turns out that by default they archive all their windows logs as they hit the maximum allowed size.  Currently we have a mix of 2003 and 2008 DC's. The obvious answer for me was to create a group policy for all servers to enable the logs to overwrite as needed with a maximum size that was suitable for at least a days worth of logs as we have NetIQ setup to harvest the logs centrally. This worked fine on the 2003 machines but didn't seem to be working on the 2008's. Digging a little further I found a registry setting called AutoBackupLogFiles which isn't changed by the Retention Method in the group policy.  

The REG_DWORD is in the following location under a key for each individual log and must be set to 0 for the logs to overwrite as needed:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\eventlog\

Handily with 2008 group policies I could create a registry preference to update this for each log and now all my servers overwrite the logs and don't just fill the hard drive with them.

Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Creating search folders for shared folders in Outlook 2007

Well I've had issues trying to create an all docs view in shared folders in Outlook 2007 using cached mode.  Eventually I worked out with the assistance of this link that to create the search you must do the following:
"Go to Tools->Instant Search->Advanced Find
    Create Search Criteria and hit Find Now
    Go to File->Save as Search Folder

The above steps would ONLY work for me if ALL of the following were also true:

    On the Advanced Find screen, click Browse
    Select the check box for the shared mailbox I wish to search
    ALSO Select the check box for the Inbox underneath the shared mailbox I wish to search
    ALSO select Search Subfolders at the bottom of the dialog box"

However this didn't quite fix the problem. The additional thing I discovered was that the option "Download Shared Folders" when using cached mode must be disabled for this to work.