Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups

Today I've been 'playing' with EventTriggers as detailed in an earlier post How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs.

I'm using bmail to fire off an email when an EventID (2031) is logged (by a performance alert) in the Event Viewer.

Todays challange was that I wanted to send the resulting email notification to multiple recipients, some of which were in the format [mobilenumber]@esendex.net (which delivers the email alert as an SMS to a mobile phone).

I found the first part of the solution on the following website:
Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups - Spiceworks Community

By creating a Distribution Group in Active Directory, and adding my contacts to that group, I could now send the alert to the email address of the distribution group and let Exchange do the rest.

The second part of the solution was to add an SMTP Connector to our Exchange server to forward emails addressed to [mobilenumber]@esendex.net through to my Esendex account which would deliver the email as an SMS to an oncall engineers mobile phone. If I wanted to be really cruel, I could address the email to [mobilenumber]@voice.esendex.net and this would deliver the email as a voice message!

(WARNING! shameless plug alert)
Take a look at these websites if you want more information on Email to SMS, configuring an SMTP Connector for Exchange, or any of Esendex's Services.

Initial thoughts on Internet Explorer 8

The Weekly Web Usage reports I receive from ISA Server show me that Firefox is the top web browser at Esendex HQ. The reports also show me that Jonathan is the top web user, Sunny is shopping for a new fireplace, and Drew likes Strictly Come Dancing!

Me, I've always been an IE man. And I have to say that I'm liking some of the new features in Internet Explorer 8, which I've been using for the past couple of weeks. I particularly like the Accelerators, which help me quickly perform my everyday browsing tasks; like Blog with Blogger, Define with Wikipedia, and Map with Google Maps. Try it, you might like it.

iPhone Batteries for Dummies

I love my iPhone, I really do. I'm not ashamed in the slightest to admit that to the whole world. It's right up there on my list along with my family, Xbox 360, VAIO Laptop, Curry, PES, and SAFC (in no particular order).
However, there are 2 things which really bug me about it:
1. I have to put it down to change the channel on the TV. My IPAQ RX3715 could change the channel on TV, why can't my iPhone? I suppose I'll have to wait for a Bluetooth TV.
2. The battery life is awful. Even when I leave it on charge all night, it barely makes it to the end of my working day :( handy for those times I go for a swift half after work though ;)

I followed a few of the recommendations on Apple's website to see if I could get a couple of extra hours out of the battery. By disabling location services and a Google Mail account, and dimming the screen slightly, I seem to be just about making it to the end of the day. Nice one.

Managing logs with Forfiles

The Esendex Development Team like blogging. There's only one thing they like more than blogging and that's logging. They like logging so much that it has been known for their logs to consume large amounts of disk space, even fill it entirely on one or two occasions. In the past this kept my colleague Chris very busy. He would manually connect to each server on a biweekly rota and clear down the logs directory; a complete waste of a valuable resource, I'm sure you'll agree.

We looked at a way to automate his task and came across a very simple solution using an old command Forfiles. By scheduling Forfiles to run as a Scheduled Task, once a month, using the following parameters, we keep the logs directory at a sensible size.

C:\WINDOWS\system32\forfiles.exe /p D:\esendex\logs /d -30 /c "CMD /C del @FILE"

Hardly Rocket Science but Chris' time can now be put to much better use. "Milk no sugar, Chris"

How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs

I discovered today that a service on an application server was terminating unexpectedly and restarting. Filtering through the event viewer I was shocked to find that this has been occurring quite frequently of late, and would need to be monitored more closely. Monitoring event logs can be a tedious task; an email notification, when a specific Event ID was logged, was definitely the way forward...

One of the best new features in Windows Server 2008's Event Viewer is the 'Attach Task to This Event' option. By right-clicking on an event and selecting this option, you can schedule a task that will be triggered if the event is logged. Actions for a triggered event include 'Send an email'. And using Esendex's Email-SMS service, we can quickly get a notification to an on-call engineer. Very nice...

Unfortunately, for me, this particular box is Windows 2003. So 'nice new feature' wasn't an option.

A quick Google search returned the following article on the Petri IT Knowledgebase:

How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs

Using a combination of: Performance Logs and Alerts, Event Viewer, and Eventtriggers we now have a proactive rather than reactive monitoring tool.