Operating Systems

FileZilla disk restore – no disk image is found in /home/partimag

So you’re having a problem restoring a CloneZilla disk image via SSH / SFTP server eh? Well you’re in for a treat! If this helped you why not toss me a $5’er via my PayPal?

The fix:

Look at your SSH server users home directory. If you have your “image” which is usually in a FOLDER you need to NOT make your home directory on your SSH server the folder with the image in it.

For example: If your image is in a path and folder called: C:\Temp\xp.2017-03-01-14-img <– in that directory you may have gz files or other “img” types of files including text files, etc…lots of stuff most likely.

If you have your home folder set at this: C:\Temp\xp.2017-03-01-14-img – CloneZilla looks for DIRECTORIES inside of there that have files and THUS – since there are NO directories inside of the xp.2017…folder, IT WILL ERROR!

Now, if you make your home directory “C:\Temp” CloneZilla FIND the directory named: xp.2017-03-01-14-img <– THEN IT WORKS!

So all you SSH’ers…make sure your home directory on your ssh server is set to where your FOLDER is but not that folder WITH THE IMAGE in it!

If you’re on Linux your home folder might be something like: /home/$youruserhere$/some_sub_dir

* Since Linux users are usually pimpin power users of systems I assume most of what I’m saying makes total sense but if you’re a Windows derp you might need some hand holding :P

As a side in my use case I forgot my stupid USB disk that had the image on it for the machine I was restoring BUT there was a copy of it on a Windows machine (not domain connected). The easiest thing was to stand up a Windows based SSH server on that PC with the image of it (hence my example of a home directory as a Winderps path) and I found a great one after slugging through a few losers programs. Rebex has a great, simple to use Windows based SSH server: http://labs.rebex.net/tiny-sftp-server

Make sure to read the “readme” file they provide and you can edit the .conf file in notepad (but the defaults are great beside the path to your image folder). Default user and pass is: tester and password. Perfect for my short term use! Be sure to set your home path properly <– can’t stress this enough obviously!

This actually took me about an hour to figure out AND nobody and I mean NOBODY on the forums properly answered this question (IMHO).

Cpanel SMTP connection from [67.219.197.229] or [127.0.0.1]

I had this CPanel problem today, actually it’s been for quite some time but I didn’t get around to checking it until lately.

My CPanel server was in a compromised state, there was an old Sugar CRM installed on a virtual host that was quite old. That page got hacked and subsequently that virtual domain got hacked.

Long story short is it took me about 2 hours (it feels like) to tack things down, delete / move those compromised pages and kill the process sending out spam.

In the end run this commands:

ps -C exim -fH eww

Now, if you see “mailnull” running, KILL IT!

kill pid <– here

This is my output for the ps command:

UID PID PPID C STIME TTY STAT TIME CMD
mailnull 32274 1 0 12:15 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/exim -bd -q60m

I’d also recommend just checking your crontabs in any compromised account to make sure something won’t come back on you!

Supportexpertz posts here had a great script to iterate through all the users and show their crontabs and how to implement / run it! Thanks!

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=885195

Migrating Windows XP to VirtualBox

Migrate XP or other Windows OS’s to VirtualBox

I needed to migrate a Windows XP box because it has a special piece of software…what special piece of software you ask? A real museum piece! Lotus 1-2-3 with a special quote form I didn’t have time to migrate into something more contemporary.

I ran into lots of issues, here’s how I worked past those issues and made it happen:
* Fair warning here, you MAY have to re-register Windows when it boots up (I had to for XP but it worked to do so)

First: Read the how to from VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

* After renaming the agp440.sys and the intelppm.sys then running the MergeIDE bat file image the machine per their instructions

1 – Make an image of the current physical box with clonezilla. It will bust it up into different size files, the default is 2000 megabytes (2 gig chunks). I’d make it much larger, if you have an 80 gig drive make it 85000 (85 gig just to be safe). I didn’t happen to do that but I think it’s an arbitrary thing ultimately since when you read the image back into the disk clonezilla automatically does it’s thing regardless of chunk size.

2 – Create a new XP virtual machine in VirtualBox (can’t hold your hand on this one…it would take too long to tell you how to do that so I assume you’re not a total derp and you can manage this step).

3 – Select the new XP image > settings > storage > select the CD drive (Empty) > Click the drop down to the far right of “Optical Drive” and select your clonezilla ISO (I assume you have this in a folder on the new machine running VirtualBox).

4 – Boot the machine and image your saved image back to the virtual drive. Once done shut the machine down.

5 – Here’s where I ran into a lot of problems on boot up:

Virtual Box boots up and it’s just a black screen. For this you need to be quick on the draw and hit F8 repeatedly to bring up the safe mode prompt. Then boot into safe mode, you should see either more black screen OR files flying accross the screen.
If you also see the lines at the bottom just haning there and doing nothing this is also the fix for this problem:

I found that in c:\windows\inf\ <– that folder on my imaged machine was EMPTY! Copy the data from your old physical box into your new one. I had to rename the INF folder to INF.kill > make a new INF folder then dump my files in there. You might also want to delete any “oem” inf files, in Linux you can do a: “ls | grep oem” to see the files with oem in their names then “rm -f oem*.inf” to delete all the INF files, note there are “PNF” files still left. I left those…not sure what they’re for!

Once you do that…more problems but we can fix them.

I got a blue screen that said: {Registry File Failure}:
Good one! It says: \SystemRoot\System32\Config\DEFAULT or its log or alternate. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

All you need to do here on XP is restore the registry backup! In c:\windows\system32\config there’s a file named “default” and “default.save”. Rename the “default” to “default.kill” so the system won’t look at it then rename “default.save” to “default”. The .save file is your registry’s “last known good” ;)
You can also go to your old physical box > boot up a Linux Live disk > migrate to that folder and copy your current “default” file onto removable media (USB disk) > then sneaker net it over to your other box > overwrite the default in the c:\windows\….config folder.

Reboot! Try safe mode just to be safe.
Success (at least for me). You then login and you get errors about: “The file or directory c:\windows\system is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.”.

** Fair warning again – this totally HOSED me when it booted up because when it booted up it didn’t want to run the registration wizard so I re-did the migration knowing what to check (see above notes so far) and it went perfectly the second time…I think the original image back was borked since the INF folder was empty and the registry file was bad.

Computer > right click c: > properties > tools > error checking > check both boxes > start > reboot
Windows will go through a litany of file systems checks and repair the error. Windows should now come up normally.
After that’s all done > install your guest additions > make sure your drivers area good and things work. If it mostly works I’d call it a success!

One last thing – you need to delete any OEM inf files in c:\windows\inf folder > you can ignore the *.pnf files. Delete all the OEM one’s. When I booted up my Live Linux distro I went to the terminal > cd’d to the directory (wherever yours mounts it) then did a:

ls | grep oem

or you might need to do: ls | grep OEM

Just to make sure you have all the oem INF files in the list and your syntax is correctly typed THEN you can do: rm -f oem*.inf <– enter

Done!

Now reboot and let it boot up normally.

This is basically what I did – just do it! You have the saved image and as long as it imaged correctly you can do this all day ;)

PFSense freshclam crontab

PFSense postfix forwarder + mailscanner + freshclam contab

I recently brought email “in house” for a client. The setup they had was:

mail going to their web hosting provider (CPanel web host) > they then had their email server (Exchange 2003) setup with a pop3 connector that would pop email down every 15 minutes to user inboxes > users would then get their email.

This setup is less than ideal primarily because:

Email is delayed depending on when the pop connector checks it and the users check it.
Connecting other devices like phones, tablets and such also experience receiving delays
No real root access to the filter mechanism on the CPanel server

Ideally it should be as direct as possible and in your control as much as possible.

The solution I came up with was to replace their lame Netgear VPN firewall which was not a real solution because of how limited and inflexible it is with a far more flexible and feature rich open source firewall called PFSEnse. We’ve got almost 30 of these deployed for a number of clients in various configurations depending on their needs.

What we needed then was an anti-spam solution since the one benefit of the CPanel pop connector solution was that server did a bulk of the filtering for viruses, malware (I assume) and spam.

We used postfix forwarder and connected it to active directory which worked PERFECTLY however, I wasn’t able to figure out how to filter out zip file and other attachments. Eventually I found the solution and you can too if you check out their forums BUT what wasn’t clear was clamav and updating it.

As it stands, clamav doesn’t get automatically updated and you have to make a cron separately to do it.

So from the console do this:

setenv EDITOR /usr/local/bin/nano <– that will set your editor as nano, otherwise it’s VI.
crontab -e <– that will edit your root crontab if you’re logged in as root, and you should be
I put this in as my cron: * 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * * /usr/local/bin/freshclam

That should update clamav definitions every 4 hours, the first * = minutes, the second section with the 0,4, 8…etc is the hours in the day so at midnight (0 hours) it runs freshclam which fetches clamav updates.

I’d recommend using: PFSense + postfix forwader + mailscanner

It seems like mailscanner started blocking zip file attachments (among others) and anything it missed, the postfix forwader header and mime mods I made also caught some. In addition to the RBL’s it’s a solid system.

Note that in mailscanner you’ll get a footer in a blocked piece of content like this: “For all your IT requirements visit: http://www.transtec.co.uk“

That’s because those guys sponsor mailscanner I guess (or develop it, not sure) and you can edit that out on PFSEnse x64 bit in this directory, all the report text files have it at the bottom:

/usr/pbi/mailscanner-amd64/local/share/MailScanner/reports/en

* Assuming you use the English version, if not it’s a directory higher and in the language you chose in the setup

The setup they now have is: Email to their firewall which runs postfix forwarder tied to active directory for valid recipient checking > mailscanner to check for viruses, spam and bad attachments > postfix forwarder for more checking > user inbox. It’s a fast, more direct and realtime method without much delay, certainly not 15 minutes! LOL!

Vonage and Comcast troubleshooting notes

I had a client recently get Vonage Business. We’re using a PFSense which is in my honest opinion, “Enterprise Class”. It scales like no other for the price!

I’m going to document my troubleshooting, more to come. My client was experiencing voice jitter, voice fading and call dropping on occasion.

The first thing I did was a trace route. Linux that command is: traceroute hostname, Windows it’s: tracert hostname. In my example I trace routed to the SIP provisioning IP / host name of Vonage which at the time of writing is: prov.vocalocity.com.

I did the trace route on CTS Telecom (Fiber), Charter and Comcast. The interesting thing is that on CTS and Charter it worked from start to finish!

I’m removing the first 5 hops so you don’t know where I live :P Stalkers!

Charter HOME connection trace:

traceroute to prov.vocalocity.com (205.139.46.227), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

…
6 lag-200.ear3.Chicago2.Level3.net (4.35.108.149) 50.797 ms 42.233 ms *
7 ae-1-3501.edge4.Chicago3.Level3.net (4.69.203.254) 41.505 ms ae-14-3604.edge4.Chicago3.Level3.net (4.69.204.166) 20.111 ms 20.375 ms
8 208.174.226.209 (208.174.226.209) 21.629 ms 21.607 ms 21.618 ms
9 cr2-tengig-0-5-3-0.chd.savvis.net (206.28.96.5) 19.501 ms 50.857 ms 57.366 ms
10 206.28.97.129 (206.28.97.129) 76.101 ms 74.702 ms 75.813 ms
11 hr1-te-1-0-0.atlantaat1.savvis.net (204.70.197.157) 74.757 ms 72.764 ms 74.133 ms
12 das1-v3006.at1.savvis.net (205.139.48.54) 64.993 ms 64.200 ms 64.097 ms
13 63.128.70.218 (63.128.70.218) 62.473 ms 52.542 ms 51.231 ms
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *^C
…it never finishes!

Notice I preface this with a HOME connection…why? Because the business Charter is DIFFERENT!

Charter BUSINESS trace:

Tracing route to prov.vocalocity.com [205.139.46.227]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

…
6    18 ms    15 ms    15 ms bbr01aldlmi-bue-1.aldl.mi.charter.com [96.34.2.8]
7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
8    30 ms    22 ms    22 ms ae-2-3601.edge4.Chicago3.Level3.net [4.69.203.230]
9    20 ms    22 ms    32 ms 208.174.226.209
10    21 ms    22 ms    21 ms cr2-tengig-0-5-3-0.chd.savvis.net [206.28.96.5]
11    38 ms    38 ms    38 ms 206.28.97.129
12    37 ms    38 ms    38 ms hr1-te-1-0-0.atlantaat1.savvis.net [204.70.197.157]
13    50 ms    45 ms    49 ms das1-v3005.at1.savvis.net [205.139.48.50]
14    40 ms    44 ms    55 ms 63.128.70.218
15    40 ms    38 ms    38 ms 205.139.46.227
16    37 ms    41 ms    38 ms 205.139.46.227

Trace complete.

It finishes and the ROUTES are different!

Charter must route their traffic differently based on home user or business.

Comcast was much like the Charter failures for home users:

5 te-0-4-0-19-ar02.pontiac.mi.michigan.comcast.net (162.151.63.41) 26.269 ms
te-0-4-0-18-ar02.pontiac.mi.michigan.comcast.net (162.151.63.37) 18.524 ms 17.141 ms
6 be-33668-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.45) 29.193 ms 24.221 ms 27.240 ms
7 c-eth-0-3-0-pe05.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.86.38) 22.148 ms 25.057 ms 22.213 ms
8 ber1-tengig3-3.chicagoequinix.savvis.net (208.173.180.41) 24.499 ms 23.066 ms 27.972 ms
9 cr1-tengig-0-5-3-0.chd.savvis.net (206.28.96.29) 31.775 ms 31.013 ms 31.473 ms
10 206.28.97.129 (206.28.97.129) 52.204 ms 55.201 ms 48.346 ms
11 hr1-te-1-0-0.atlantaat1.savvis.net (204.70.197.157) 46.763 ms 58.040 ms 48.552 ms
12 das1-v3006.at1.savvis.net (205.139.48.54) 49.561 ms 49.876 ms 56.578 ms
13 63.128.70.218 (63.128.70.218) 53.821 ms 58.421 ms 46.651 ms
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *

I had to actually call Comcast tier 1 tech support – yes, the people who just tell you to reboot your router. Then, after discussing it with the tier 1 tech he logged into the modem I was on and did his own trace route. He said, it works for me. It finishes. I said, really – what IP address did you resolve to and get to? He told me and it was some IP address in the Netherlands! I then insisted he get this escalated because who in their right mind would do VOIP from the midwest to servers across the Atlantic ocean to the Netherlands? That makes no sense.

You have to push these guys to THINK!

After submitting my ticket, the trace routes FINALLY work like they should.

I can’t say this fixed my call quality issues but I’m still troubleshooting. These things take time BUT don’t EVER rule out the ISP’s network as possibly causing the problem. This is the 2nd time and ISP has had the problem with routing on their backbone that has affected service. The other time I dealt with Frontier about their backbone in Muskegon, MI – they were great about it and I actually talked to the guy who fixed it out of New York. I did an IP Who Is lookup which lists the maintainers email (that never works) and the telephone of the maintainer – which told me to call another number, then after a brief phone tree battle I got to the guy who fixed it!

Moving on…

I also updated / forced the phones on the network to use Google DNS servers, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I am trying that rather than the local DNS server and in favor of using Comcast’s which is 75.75.75.75 and 75.75.76.76. Comcast (believe it or not) DNS servers have 150 ms + ping times OMG! Google DNS servers; something like 20 ms or less, maybe a touch over BUT they’re fast. I don’t know if that will make a difference to the phone quality (probably not) but it’s another thing I’m touching and changing.

QoS might be next BUT once your traffic hits the public InternetS all bets for QoS are off. QoS is really for your local network and routing but my client is barely touching their WAN – they’re too busy working and nobody steams or uses the Internet for more than work.

I’ll update this as I move forward, I thought about SIP proxy with the PFSense and QoS on that SIP Proxy per some tutorials on the PFSense forum but haven’t gone there yet.

PID 4 Microsoft Server 2012 high CPU

I had an interesting thing I hadn’t seen before on a VMware guest that was a Windows Server 2012 machine.

Symptoms:
System process (PID 4) 50% cpu or higher: vmware 5.x + server 2012.

I looked at another 2012 server and noticed it had the e1000 NIC in it and I remember when building this current server I had changed it to the vmxnet3 thinking, oh…vmnet3 NIC must be better than the e1000. I was wrong. I don’t think Server 2012 likes the vmxnet3 for whatever reason (driver related) regardless of whether you have VMware Tools installed or not because I did; and it wasn’t having problems. So I Changed the NIC from vmxnet3 to e1000.

Again; it’s related to a networking issue (References):

http://blogs.technet.com/b/yongrhee/archive/2009/08/07/how-to-troubleshoot-high-cpu-in-the-system-process.aspx
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1077
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2231

I don’t think any of those happen to actually say, switch from vmxnet3 to e1000 BUT that’s what I did and the problem went away!

Slow performance on VMware, SAN, iSCSI and guests

I experienced something interesting the past week for a client. Slow performance on iSCSI, SAN and VMWare when large throughput or heavy network i/o was occurring. They had a setup like this:

VMware > All VM’s on a big fat volume iSCSI to the SAN > SAN < 1 TB volume

Inside the guest (Server 2012 for example), you then make an iSCSI connection to the SAN to run their db’s, file shares, etc. They were using Sage 2014 and it was VERY slow especially when printing or running reports. It took me what seemed like FOREVER to figure it out BUT in the end it was all about the MTU. If you don’t know what MTU is, go look it up :P

In the end make sure your MTU matches this with a Dell setup:

SAN interfaces = MTU 9000 (they had a Dell Equallogix PS4100 – that might be auto configured, I think it is)
Switch where SAN & VMWare connect = MTU 9252 (they had a Dell Force10 S60)
VMware = MTU 9000 (that means ALL vswitches)

Note that you ALSO want MTU on the interface where your VM’s talk to the rest of your network. For me that was the vmkernel port and the physical switch ports on the core switch that connected the physical to the virtual – MTU 9252.

There’s a decent kb from VMWare that pointed me in the right direction. Oh, I also believe I disabled the ACK on the VMware iSCSI connector inside the VMWare server based on another KB but this didn’t really help me as far as I know, I have not turned it back on. Again, check that out online if the MTU confirmation doesn’t work for you it might be the ACK on the iSCSI connector.

Update BIOS and BMC on Dell SC24

Updating BIOS and BMC on a Dell SC24

Un – FREAKING – real!

I managed to (biting nails, fingers, wrists and arms) to update the BIOS and BMC on my Dell SC24. I purchased mine from Stallard Technologies. Here’s the link to the server: http://www.stikc.com/Catalog/dell-custom-servers-CS24-SC

I’d recommend calling and asking for William or Geoff, a couple of sales guys from that place I do business with. I am NOT in any way making money by putting a link to their site, I in no way work for that company and I in no way have ever met them. I pretty much email them and have spoke with Geoff about some RMA’s because a system I put in didn’t go well (blogged about the Dell drive controllers on another post).

Back to business!

References for this “how to” are as follows – again, NOTHING I found was clear cut and nobody held your hand like I’m going to…I’m that sensitive! LOL!

The most helpful: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/cloud/f/4442/t/19512575.aspx

The second most helpful and the post that got me going, it was the first one I found: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/cloud/f/4715/t/19456940.aspx?pi239031352=1

Now down to brass tacks. I recommend BEFORE doing anything you read those two posts AND my entire post – yes even the bottom – just so you know how this crap works OK! If I EVER catch you trying something WITHOUT understanding it first…I’m bringing the pain! Running scripts without reviewing them, downloading junk on the Intenet then applying it to hot machines…big mistake. I am a fairly trusted sources though BUT STILL! Please understand what YOU are doing then we’ll all be a better race.

Another side – if this made things easy as pie for you, how about a $5 donation…or a $2 donation? On the right hand side toward the top you can PayPal me –> :-)

Donations received:

Eder Torreiro – Spain ($2 April, 2014)
Rafael (Badwolf) – US ($5 April, 2017)

1 – Fire up your server, get into the BIOS by hitting f2. Navigate in the BIOS screen to your BMC and find out what IP address it is. I think by default it’s set to DHCP. I believe under the BIOS screen it’s under the “Server” area.

2 – Open a web browser and try to get into the BMC – it’s usually: https://IPaddressHERE:447 or maybe port 81. Mine was :447. The default user will be one of two things. root:root (like mine was) or root:changeme (per the documentation for this BMC). By the way I think it goes without saying that in order to connect with a web browser to your BMC you need to have it plugged into ETHERNET. It’s the optional NIC next to the 2 onboard dual NIC’s. Plug that in first, then do the above step in the BIOS to find the IP address.

3 – Now that you’ve established you can get into your BMC go to:

BMC Version (tab): You should see something LESS than 1.95 for “Firmware Revision”

Server Board Information (tab): You should see something LESS than “S45_3A20”. Mine started out at BMC 1.10 and FW S45_3A09.

4 – Go to this website and download rufus, it is quite nice: http://rufus.akeo.ie/

5 – Make a freedos boot disk on USB. This assumes you have a USB disk you can live without for now as it WILL wipe out all your files so back that disk up!

6 – Download my files that I collected from the above forums: http://rafaelwolf.com/sharedfiles/sc24_bios_and_bmc_udpates.zip

7 – Extract them to your desktop or something. On your pen drive make a directory called “bios”, copy the files you just extracted there. Feel free to look at the bat files, you’ll be calling them in the DOS environment, nothing sexy as it could be here but eh; it gets the job done!

8 – Reboot your server, you might need to do another “F2” and get into the boot options making your USB drive the fist boot device, I had to.

9 – Boot to DOS, you’ll see a “c:\” just sitting there if you’re successful and I know you will be because you’re under expert tutelage :P

10 – NOW, here’s the warning – this has ONLY worked on my SC24. Like all the other losers online I make no warranties or guarantees. It’s now time for YOU to do some nail biting :P

11 – cd bios

12 – bios.bat – per the bat file contents it will backup your current BIOS to “S45_3A09.ROM” and then slap the new one on there for you.

13 – That will get done successfully

14 – bmc.bat – per the bat file contents it will backup your current BMC version to “backup.BIN” and then slap the new one on there for you.

15 – When it’s successful you can do a ctrl + alt + del. One commenter on the forums said yank the cord but I don’t think you have to…even though I pussed out and did!

NOTE: Don’t cry too early – you WILL GET AN ERROR, FANS WILL SCREAM. The BIOS will get a “checksum error” BUT it will say…resetting to defaults in 5 seconds. Your server will reboot and all will be right with the world. DO NOT NOT NOT YANK THE CORD if you see this checksum error.

Another note: I have VMWare 5.5 with all the updates and the server is STILL misbehaving. I might try and back rev it to 5.1 or something. The processors are at 50% utilization or higher with NOTHING on them. A real shame but I don’t think the SC24’s are on the HCL for VMWare so…that’s what I get.

If by chance you need to restore your firmware or your BMC firmware, you can – we backed it up. You’ll need to edit those batch files and point them to the backups to do a “restore” but if it works I don’t know who would want to go back.

Zentyal domain password settings expiration

Disable Zentyal password expiry

Just a note to others who have now bumped into this problem. My user passwords have been expiring and I found this link helpful:

http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=12279.0

Command to show your settings: samba-tool domain passwordsettings show

https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2013-June/174002.html

Command to set passwords never to expire (in my environment that’s what I want): samba-tool domain passwordsettings set –max-pwd-age=0

That will turn off expiring passwords for your domain on systems like Zentyal or anything using samba with the password settings set.

XP and Server 2003 end of life scare tactics

Industry scare tactics

I keep getting things like this in my email:

Don’t get me wrong, I love Stallard, I buy from them and I understand their viewpoint. They come from the philosophy there’s no harm in using a bit of fear to prod customers to pry open their wallets. With Stallard, it’s not usually a large investment, they really are a pretty good bargain, good support, good warranty, etc. I’m not here to give a gleaming review BUT I am here to use them as an example of what many IT companies do.

They use scare tactics to sell units. It’s unwise in my opinion to make decisions based on fear. Several things to point out about the EOL or “End of Life” of a Windows or any other product.

They won’t be releasing patches – so what, they’ve probably ramped down patching that product anyway and have been reallocating resources into newer products.
No support – so what, there’s still plenty of blogs, posts, support and patches available for download or reading that aren’t on Microsoft’s site or the vendors site 9 times out of 10.
Non compliance – Yes, you may be non-compliant with HIPPA…BUT, if you don’t have to comply with HIPPA, the SEC or other government organizations so what, the OS still works and if you’ve taken a few steps to protect yourself like not use your computer as an admin, us FireFox with adblock lite, noscript, have antirus running and don’t use your computer for non-work related surfing…then who cares? You can still use a perfectly good OS UNTIL your actual applications stop working.
Leaving your system vulnerable to attack – come on! You can’t be serious! Isn’t your system ALWAYS vulnerable to attack…technically? Unless you minimize your footprint (exposure to the outside or inside) you’re always at risk. Systems should be designed to be “locked down”, not only physically but digitally including internal access. That means putting it behind a firewall, that means having the server firewall enabled and configured, not using the server as a workstation and browsing the web with it, etc.
Exchange 2003 – the ONLY reason to be in a rush to dump Exchange 2003 is because it might not work well with new devices. Most enterprises that I’m aware of no longer use Exchange 2003, I believe people still using it are the people with Small Business Server 2003 which bundles Exchange 2003 into it. Those folks are out of luck in newer Small Business Server offerings from M$ (Micro$oft) and M$’s unbundled it so they can push you to their cloud offerings. I wouldn’t make any rash moves here, what I’d do is look at open source alternatives to Exchange like Zarafa (completely free, web based all you need is licensing if you want to use Outlook ha ha!), Kerio Connect (not free but cheap), Zimbra (a bit more than Kerio) or if you don’t need Exchange functionality with shared calendaring or the Exchange protocol (so you can use smart phone’s, tablet’s, etc that use the Exchange protocol) just use an open source server like postfix or sendmail. Pretty much ANY web hosting provider already offers you an email server included in your hosting package. I had a client using their hosting providers email server (postfix) that had like 25 users and they just pop’d their mail down. They’ve since moved it to the next level and have almost 70 email users and they’re using Zimbra with a dedicated server but it worked for them for quite some time. For “shared calendaring” they actually used (at the time) a sharepoint calendar which is built into windows server for free ;)

The point of this post is this…

Don’t let someone scare you just because there’s some deadline – your servers WON’T stop working, they WON’T blow up and they’re NOT a ticking time bomb. Slow down, look at your options and in fact…it’s a PERFECT TIME to re-evaluate your strategy when it comes to IT. Perhaps a look at a new open source option like Zentyal is for you? It’s an open source “small business server” that’s a replacement for small business server from Microsoft, has AD like integration, Zarafa email services, DNS, file sharing, etc, etc. It’s great, I have it implemented on a site for a client and they love it.