Life in the internet age

Having http://images.google.com is marvelous.
Today I was able to confirm that a part number was actually the cable I wanted.
CAB-SS-V35MT
Not long ago I'd have to find a catalog and hope it had a detailed picture (and none of the catalogs I ever used back in the "paper" days had useful pictures.

T1 Crossover Cable

It's nice to setup routers in advance with CSU's back to back to have everything configured and working before the circuits are installed and routers shipped out to remote site.
I've done this with RJ45 T1 crossover cable:

Exchange::Archive

Another vendor choice: http://www.kvsinc.com/

DNS

"Ted's tools" at http://www.mob.net/~ted/tools/index.html
has some good utilities.
I like the MXLookup that will lookup MX records from several DNS servers.

Network Security::Spam

I only skimmed this article, I want to go back and read it more thoroughly later. But so far it really creeps me out.
http://gray-world.net/papers/spamdoor.txt
It is a "black hat" article about back door communications. The proposition is using e-mail communication disguised as spam to relay information between a back door creator and it's creator.

Exchange Data Archive Tools

There are HSM/Exchange archive tools available from at least 3 vendors: Veritas, CommVault, & C2C.
Rumors from others who've tested them are:
- CommVault product is better from the administrators perspective - more flexible scheduling of jobs and ability to delegate more granular permissions to the point a helpdesk role could be allowed to restore an Exchange item.
- Veritas exchange storage manager - has more cleaner client integration, not as flexible admin
- C2C Archive1 is much simpler and uses an Exchange Public Folder store on a separate server. And archival jobs are separate from backups.
Veritas has a free Exchange storage evaluation tool:

http://www.veritas.com/products/listing/ProductDownloadList.jhtml?productId=storagemigratorwin#utilities