Are you running a SMTP server on a Windows Server? Then you need to use the Microsoft Exchange Server SMTPDiag Tool. It will verify your SMTP, DNS and firewall settings to ensure everything is setup properly and you are able to send email.

If you use a loopback address (127.0.0.1) or hosts files on your Windows Server to reference a local IIS web application with Windows Authentication it will probably fail with a 401 error due to a new security constraint. This is often the case if you use a public url for your Sharepoint of TFS server. To resolve this you need to add a registry key…

1. Open regedit
2. Open the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Create a new DWORD under Lsa named DisableLoopbackCheck
4. Set its value to 1
5. Restart the server for good measure

Related Links

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

http://ppalakollu.blogspot.com/2009/04/ie-8-ntlm-authentication-on-windows.html

I think this has been out for a bit, but I just came across it. Its a FREE stand-alone Hyper-V server for Windows. Think of it as as Windows Server 2008 R2 with only the Hyper-V role installed. I’m a huge believe in virtualized server; whether they are on your own physical servers or up in the cloud somewhere. The ability to save states, create templates and change out your server(s) configuration on the fly is great. This product allows you to do all of that but with very low resource overhead. I already run Hyper-V on my servers so this will be an easy switch. Any new server I configure, this will be the base “OS”.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Product Page

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

Windows Virtualization Team Blog

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-release-candidate-free-live-migration-ha-anyone.aspx

If you are still using plain-old notepad.exe then I highly suggest you check out Notepad2. It is a much improved version of notepad but without all the bloat and madness of Word. If you’re using Notepad2 already then you might want to check out the extended version. It adds some additional features such as code collapsing and the installer does the Windows work to replace notepad.exe with notepad2.exe.

http://code.kliu.org/misc/notepad2/

This one is pretty self explanatory… I’m not sure why Microsoft didn’t enable this by default.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-encrypt-decrypt-options-to-windows-vista-right-click-menu/

MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR ENCRYPTION KEY TO AN OFF-SITE LOCATION

If you move an encrypted file to another machine (like in the case of a OS rebuild) you MUST have the encryption key to restore the files. If you don’t have it; you’re out of luck.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/back-up-your-file-encryption-key-in-windows-vista/