MDaemon & World Client

One of the schools I support chose MDaemon as their email solution not long ago. It closely tries to emulate Exchange Server with a couple nice extras that one would normally pay BIG $/£ for with a "Connector" License. However, if your organization utilizes any pdas, blackberries etc, do yourself an your organization a favour and get Exchange. The amount of synchronization issues and incompatibilities with MDaemon eats into support hours very quickly!

BUT, if you do decide to use MDaemon or you are already blessed with the responsibility of administering one, you will no doubt come across product activation. It tends to work the same as MS's activation, where it is done automatically through the internet. When that doesn't work, a phonecall or email gets you the help you need to activate (You have a 30 day limit) within a day or two. Why am I going in to all this? If your NIC dies out, or you swap in a new NIC because you are upgrading, you will HAVE TO reactivate. What a pain yes. What I discovered in the process were some events that begun to appear in my DNS Logs afterwards.

If you are swapping this out on a domain controller, uninstall the old nic first. If you want to make sure the new NIC works first like me, you didn't do that. You ended up with two nics on the same box. This gets a bit tricky with DNS events 6701/2, bindings and static ip addresses, so do yourself a favour and uninstall the old nic first.

Once I had both NICS on the domain controller/mail server, I simply shut the server down and removed the old nic. The problem with that is the old nic settings stay hidden in the operating system hardware configuration. Any time you go to view your TCP/IP properties a pop-up dialgoue box alerts you to having two NICs with the same ip. If you didn't uninstall the old nic like you should have, you can do this by going to add/remove hardware, and ticking the "hidden" checkbox. You will now be able to remove your old invisible nic card, and avoid potential DNS issues and such.