Andy – Page 21 – Absoblogginlutely!

Security warning pops up when using Outlook2007 and Exchange 2007

By Andy on Wednesday, April 29, 2009

After a recent migration of mail to Exchange2007, we’ve just started getting users logging tickets where a security window pops up saying “The name of the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site”. This can happen even when the client is not at their desk. It took a few seconds to work out what was causing it – the clue was that the window had an icon in the taskbar for outlook. Searching in Google found Microsoft’s KB article 940726 with the resolution to the fix which involves changing various internal url attributes.
The instructions are fairly straightforward but I wanted to see what the values were set to before making the change. As I’m not very familiar with powershell it took me a while to work out what I needed.
For the command

Set-ClientAccessServer -Identity Servername -AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri https://name.contoso.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

you want to run the command

Get-ClientAccessServer -Identity Servername | fl
The pipe fl provides all the values in a list – if you don’t include this part of the code you will end up with one line containing the name of the server – a value that you hopefully know already!
I really need to get cracking on my powershell skills – I still prefer good old fashioned dos batch programming but now that we’ve started to roll out powershell across all machines, powershell skills will be in demand more and more.

Moving to the states Real Life

4 Years in the States.

By Andy on Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Monday was our fourth anniversary of being in the States. As it is now Wednesday you can tell I forgot! I did actually realize it yesterday but I ended up working until 8.30pm last night on a very weird networking issue so didn’t have time to celebrate or anything.
I was back in the UK for 5 days over Easter to attend the funeral of my Uncle which was a sad occasion, but it was nice to meet up with other family members and some relatives I’d only met a couple of times.
People often ask me if England is much different to Ohio and normally I would have said no, but having been back I would have to say it is fairly different. When Kristen’s parents came over to the uk when we were living there, they would often remark how narrow the roads are, how green everything is, people’s accents are so amazing and does it always rain this much? My observation whilst I was back was how narrow the roads are, how green everything is, people’s accents are so strong and I wish it would stop raining! Actually that last bit was not strictly true as the weather wasn’t too bad – it rained heavily on the day we drove back from Croydon to Chesterfield – a 180 mile journey that took 6 hours – NOT fun – but the rest of the week was pretty good with just a few scattered showers.
I was pretty amazed at the strong accents I heard whilst I was there – although I was in Chesterfield there were a lot of people around with strong yorkshire accents but it was so different to hear all these different accents that I would have normally not paid any attention too. I still get comments about my accent over here in the States and still get asked to record people’s voicemail messages and to “just say something” to people when I’m introduced to them.

Uncategorized

No more NDR’s

By Andy on Tuesday, April 21, 2009

As a follow up to my previous post on NDR’s being sent after Exchange2003 is rebooted, the server was rebooted earlier this week and as far as I know, no ndr’s were sent which is good news.

Exchange / Outlook Hotfixes

Exchange 2003 NDR’s are sent a long time after email was sent.

By Andy on Thursday, April 2, 2009

The past two reboots (where the server has been offline for a while) has resulted in non delivery reports being sent back to some of the mailboxes for mail that was sent several weeks ago and that had not been reported as failed when the mail was initially sent.
The first time this happened I thought it was just one of those things, especially as I had not seen mail in the queue before rebooting the server. After the second occurrence I knew it was time to investigate.
SBSisyphus has a great posting including a link to the exchange2003 (sp2) patch that should fix the “kb950757 Email senders do not receive an indication that some messages have been held by Exchange Server 2003 until the SMTP service, The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, or the Exchange server is restarted”. I applied it to my machine and I’ll have to see what happens.
For what it’s worth you do not need to reboot the server (unless wmiprvse.exe is running – but you get an option to kill this process if it is running before proceeding) but it will stop and start your mail and web services so don’t apply it during the day and it goes without saying that you should have a backup first.

Vmware Work

Columbus Meetup on Vmware

By Andy on Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I don’t know that much about vmware apart from loading up some virtual images in the vmware player some time ago. I’m more of a hyper-v fan currently, but thats mainly because it fits nicely onto my lab machine.
Anyway, tonight I’m off to the Techlife Columbus Meetup at the Buckeye hall of fame cafe to hear about VMWare courtesy of work. I’m looking forward to it as I should come away with some good tidbits of information and also get to go around the cafe as I’ve never been there before.
The Techlife Columbus group seems to be pretty active and has groups on LinkedIn and also allegedly on Facebook although the link to Facebook doesn’t work (there’s a surprise). Worth checking out to see if there are any social, training or networking events that would be of interest to you, your job or your career. Obviously if you don’t live in Columbus this particular group is unlikely to be of interest, but it would be worth looking to see if there are other groups in your area.

Incidentally my profile pages are here on linkedin and Facebook or you can check out my other networks from my retaggr page.

Bugs Work

Unable to sync while offline.

By Andy on Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Had a weird issue with a Palm device using Activesync. The device would not synchronise when the laptop pc was working offline. This functionality was fixed/improved in Activesync 4.5 but unfortunately the device was already at this version.
Eventually we found that going to the device and selecting Start > Settings > Connections > USB to PC and remove “Enable advanced network functionality” and then doing a sync worked fine.

Google Search Engines Wordpress

Google Love followup.

By Andy on Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Ok, so creating my google sitemap didn’t help due to a setting I had already setup in WordPress. When I was testing the migration I had set the privacy options under Settings/ Privacy to block search engines but allow other visitors. This had the unfortunate result of adding the disallow * in the robots.txt file – thus blocking google. Setting it back to make my blog visible has (hopefully) done the trick. Note that the robots.txt is automatically generated by wordpress so you not find one if you go looking with shell access – just access the file through a browser.
Hopefully this setting has not harmed by Google Page rank too much.
Update – just checked and my posts are now appearing in Google again – phew!

Bugs Microsoft Windows 2003 Work

Performance monitor showing numbers instead of counters.

By Andy on Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Had a weird error today with a machine only showing numbers instead of descriptions in the performance counters. Thanks to maximum asp this is solved by exporting the registry entries from hklm\ Software\ Microsoft\ WindowsNT\ CurrentVersion\ Perflib\ 009 from another machine and importing back into the affected machine. This kind of solution is great if you have another machine that you can export from – not too great if this is the only machine you have access too. If you don’t have access then “You could check the strings in the 009 key under the key described below and look for any garbled entries, entries that have two numbers, or entries that have two strings in succession (you should see ### string ### string, and so on in the multi-sz editor). This may not explain the different behavior between the local and remote cases because they both access the same registry values. (KB152153). Good luck with that!

Google

Argh – I disappeared from Google.

By Andy on Tuesday, February 24, 2009

I went to check something on Google that I know I had blogged about and was not happy when I discovered that I wasn’t appearing in Google results anymore. The annoying thing was that my posts were coming in as Technorati results or on a scummy searchengine spammer that had grabbed my content into their system.
I checked Google’s Webmaster tools and found out that my sitemap was woefully out of date so I downloaded the Google XML sitemap plugin by Arne Brachhold and also added the All in one SEO pack plugin for WordPress too.
After installing these two plugins, creating the new sitemap I then told Google where to go find my sitemap. Hopefully this should start getting my results back into Google again.

exchange2007 Powershell Work

Powershell script to retrieve email from archived mailbox in Exchange2007

By Andy on Saturday, February 7, 2009

The other powershell script I worked on was to retrieve a detached mailbox that was still retained in exchange, archive the mail to a pst file, move the pst file to the managers home directory and then delete the mailbox again.
The following script does this – note some paths are hardcoded and I already have a temporary account in AD called tempuser that does not have a mailbox. This is the account that the deleted mailbox is attached to.
The main disadvantage to this method is that at the end of the script all of the detached mailboxes will appear as tempuser in the exchange console. In this particular script I also do very little error checking as this was designed for my use but hopefully helps others too.



$user=$args[0]  #user is the first parameter passed

$fname=$args[1] #first name

$lname=$args[2] #last name

$fullname=$fname + " " + $lname

$manager=$args[3] #manager windows accountname is the last parameter passed

if ($manager -eq $null) {exit} # if not enough parameters are provided then quit the script
write-host $user

write-host $manager

$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "attaching mailbox to tempuser account"
$result=Connect-Mailbox -Identity $fullname -Database 'servername\First Storage Group\Standard User Mailbox' -User 'domain\tempuser' -Alias 'tempuser'
$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "Sleeping 60 until moving mailbox"

start-sleep -s 60 # sleep 60 seconds after moving mailbox to tempuser account before doing the export
$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "exmerging mailbox"

export-mailbox tempuser -pstfolderpath d:\mailboxes -confirm:$false
$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle ="sleep 20 seconds"

start-sleep -s 20 # sleep 20 seconds after exporting mailbox to tempuser account before doing the mailbox move
$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "Moving pst file to managers mailbox"

$newdir="\\archiveserver\c$\users\" + $manager + "\" + $user

$result=mkdir $newdir

$newpst=$newdir + "\" + $user + ".pst"

$newpst

Move tempuser.pst $newpst

$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "disabling tempuser mailbox for reuse" disable-mailbox tempuser -confirm:$false

Note that I use the $Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle statement a lot – this enables me to easily see whereabouts in the script I have got to. I much preferred to use the command title in my batch files to do the same thing. Likewise the $null = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey(“NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown”) is the equivalent of the batch command pause