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Our oldest mail server, Scuderia is being moved to a new Windows 2003 server this week. This is a problem mail server that is only effecting a handful of clients but  those affected are some of our oldest most loyal clients so it is a big issue in our mind and an interesting story that highlights how far the IT industry has to go before it can be considered 'mature'. The server is handling mail services and is only requiring us to maintain very tight monitoring to ensure there is no disruption to mail services on this server.

Not so long ago a security company found an exploit in Windows 2000 in relation to the UNP ports. They published it and before Microsoft could release a patch a virus had been written and unleashed. Microsoft rushed a patch out. We rushed the patch on the server as we detected a number of attacks on various internal servers fearing the worst from this new worm.

This patch caused many problems with WINSOCK in the TCP/IP stack on Windows 2000– which has caused us a number of problems with our Scuderia Mail server. We reverted back to before the ZOTOB patch from Microsoft and blocked the problematic ports in the TCP/IP security settings.  But what we have found is that the whole TCP/IP stack has become problematic as the uninstall was not entirely clean. Of course this is with a Windows 2000 server and is is not an issue on Windows 2003. How the IT industry handles such security exploits and patches definitely has a long way to go.

We are moving this older server to a Windows 2003 server. All affected would have received an alert mail. All mail data between the servers will be synced and the old mail server will remain up for a week after release of the new server. We will then recycle the Scuderia server as an internal server after performing rigorous hardware checks.

Hi All, The support responses are going great. One request to all the clients, if there is minor issue related to permissions or any things similar then please submit support ticket by logging into your control panel instead of making a call. This will speed up the process of fixing issues and replying you back. URL for control panel is http://control.m6.net

A tip for the week would be, when installing DotNetNuke on your domains, please make sure that you are uploading the files in a folder, which has been setup as virtual directory and also ensure that there are write permissions for ASP.Net/NetworkService user. You can contact support for assistance, if you get any issues.