Will the madness stop?

I haven't blogged for a while, mostly because it's just been utter chaos here : all the fun associated with the start of a new academic year and some fairly major moves and changes. I'm still having fun with my accounting application via citrix, and I'm now just about ready to give up on it and install a VPN solution instead for the affected users, rather than carrying on with NFuse. This of course, means more digging around the uncharted depths of our ancient PIX firewall, where hundreds of obsolete, uncommented entries do their level best to confuse me into tears every time I look at it.

I've started looking seriously now at the problems, threats and opportunities that implementing Exchange 2007 is going to pose, and I'm quietly confident. It looks like there's some good bolt-on functionality with Outlook Anywhere and Sharepoint, and that could - I repeat could - let me get the goal of some kind of Portal off the ground without as much pain as I was thinking it might be.

Our mail scanning server then, has chosen something of an inopportune time to start pissing me off. We're running a standalone server in the DMZ which runs IMSS 7, and today it's decided it doesn't want to do anything much unless I restart the IMSS SMTP service every five minutes and bugger around with hold queues. I'll bounce it again tonight, and hope the fairies fix it, because I haven't got a clue.