Rant Space

Installing the Windows Mobile Emulator. Shortcuts dont appear on the Start Menu

2009-11-05T16:54:00Z

I cant claim this, thanks Mike.

Saved us some pain.

After the install of the WM image itself of the emulator (6, 6.1, 6.5 etc) it all appears to work but there is nothing on the Start Menu for it. This makes it difficult (but not impossible for the patient) to fire up the emulator.

Rerunning the image install again and doing a Repair seems then to go through and add in the shortcuts as we'd like

HTH

services not starting because they are timeing out prematurely?

2009-11-05T14:02:00Z

most likely in a repro/vm setup where resources are the limiting factor?

extend service startup tolerance with

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \System \CurrentControlSet \Control]
ServicesPipeTimeout = "30000"

60000 by default in w2k3. set in ms

OWA not working and showing red Xs instead of the images?

2009-11-04T17:01:00Z

it is possible for the IUSR anonymous auth account password to get out of sync between where its held in AD and the metabase

you can test this by unchecking anonymous auth on default website and exchweb and enabling IWA

stop and start the default website

does IWA auth work with OWA?

if so the password for anonymous auth are out of sync

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297989 helps getting them back in sync

E2k3 PF hierarchy or content not replicating in or out of a particular server. Using Sophos Pure Message?

2009-08-17T11:42:00Z

We've had a couple of cases where Subject tagging in the product has caused PFs to stop moving out the server.

The way we found this was quite typical for a PF case...

Use diagnostic logging on the server in question for PF and the IS objects

Find the message in the events logged

Track the message and found it only gets as far as the Categorizer.

This led me to some previous cases where PureMessage can cause this if subject tagging is on

Hope that helps somone!

OWA E2k3 stops working with 503 Service unavailable

2009-07-31T11:55:00Z

Looking at the IIS logs this specifically is a 503 0 0 on the get verb on Exchange virtual directory

This KB helps here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823159

Found a couple of instances of needing HKCRScan and this finding a key that is problematic (contact MS support for this tool)

They typically start Nxxxxxxxxx

Perhaps put in by NetApp? At least ive seen them put in by NetApp

Perfmon Counters appear as numbers

2009-07-16T15:57:00Z

Odd this one, not sure how it happened but it did.

Looks like the perfc009.dat is corrupt (file that contains the counters)

Get the file (system32 i seem to recall) from a similar OS machine, backup the broken one and copy in a good one.

Try perfmon now

How do OCS Address books work, and why is mine broken?

2009-05-13T13:30:00Z

That is a very good question...

A great link i eventually was able to get is at

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963980.aspx

So...

AD has all the info

The user replicator shifts this info to the OCS SQL DB in the ABUserEntry table

The ABServer process moves these files to a NTFS files structure in the form of Full and Differential files with names that are hex of a date that once happened :S

These are then made available through IIS where the client will download these to galcontacts.db

Saying that info is still pulled from OL contacts and also in some instances direct LDAP requests are made to the OCS pool itself

Setting up a quick OCS 2007 test environment

2009-05-08T18:46:00Z

Perhaps virtualised for testing?

Physical HW is obviously better

Two W2k3 or W2k8 boxes

Configure TCPIP appropriately on the two machines so they can chat using static IPs

Name machines appropriately

Promote one to a DC

DC is a DNS server

Install CA services on the CA

On OCS server install OCS 2007 Standard Edition, this will give a good test bed on minimum machines (assuming this is for repro/testing only!)

Install IIS as per prompt in OCS wizard

Install AD tools as per prompt in OCS wizard

This will install SQL and all the necessary components

When installed and the services are strarted the Monitoring service may not start, if not you may need to install the Message Queuing Feature

Start the relevant services

Install Admin tools as per OCS setup Wizard

Create a couple of users, Enable them for OCS

Use the Validation wizard to do some testing, they should be able to sign in

Install OCS client

Set to Manual Config and point to the OCS server (FQDN) and set to TLS

For Auto sign in and other DNS records necessary watch this nice little video... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ocs/dd221358.aspx

Setup your DNS entries and you should now be able to autosign in!

Windows Mobile not syncing with HTTP 500 internal server error and nextags showing problems with syncstate table

2009-05-07T17:02:00Z

Odd one this, it seems a couple of the reasons this can be seen are down to a corrupt syncstate table, for whatever reason..

Also if we hit problems with limits on named properties we may fail with an internal server error 500 if something like iphone is adding further named props and Exchange has hit a limit on these. But to be honest if youre at the stage where youre dealving into nextags logging you might be in a good place to give us at support a call!

OCS calling users when unlocking machine or switching from other apps

2009-05-07T17:00:00Z

This has been brought to our attention as an intermittant issue but with more work has given a thorough reproduction around the keypressing actions in the OCS client.

This behaviour is being investigated by the debug team and will be passed onto the product group accordingly.

Watch this space...

OCS DNS record creation

2009-04-02T16:13:00Z

SVR, A, SIP, internal, external? All of the above, some of the above? All and fingers crossed?

I'm setting up OCS to have a play around and althought its in the documentation much friendlier is this TN link on setting the the needed DNS records

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ocs/dd221358.aspx

Outlook takes a long time to mark Calendar appointments as tentative - sniffer process is slow

2009-03-19T19:27:00Z

Interesting this, at least i found it interesting as i had no idea this goes on. Mainly as im an Exchange person! Anyway, i still ended up looking into this...

The process in Outlook that inspects Calendar appointments and marks them as tentative (amongst other things it does) is the sniffer process.

Here is some nice info on it:

When you send out a meeting invite and the attendees respond to the meeting with Accept/Decline/Tentative responses, Outlook processes these responses either through the sniffer process, when you view the response in the Reading Pane, or when you open the response. When Outlook processes a response it locates the parent meeting (on the organizer's Calendar) for the response so the tracking tab on the meeting can be updated with the response type (Accept/Decline/Tentative) for the attendee.

POSSIBLE CAUSES:
================
Following are common scenarios where Sniffer stops functioning or the owner loses the Sniffer Lock:
1. In Manager/Delegate scenario, Manager’s sniffer lock might be owned by delegate, if Manager’s outlook profile was closed and delegate is accessing manager’s calendar
2. 3rd party addin or application on the Outlook client causing Sniffer Process to stop functioning
3. If the user logs on to multiple Outlook client machines to access mailbox, the Sniffer lock will be moved to this Outlook client

We can carry out the following tests to check for the behaviour in different scenarios:

Scenario 1: Manager / Delegate:
1. Remove all the delegate from Users Outlook profile
2. Launch Outlook with the /sniff switch at least once. This is to make sure the Sniffer Lock remains with users Outlook profile
3. Make sure Outlook is launched normally, without the /sniff command switch
4. Try to reproduce the issue

Scenario 2: Third party addins or applications:
1. Check for 3rd party addin and applications on users client machine in the following registry path
a. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins
b. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins
If we find any 3rd party addins in the above path, export the registry key(s) and check for the issue in Outlook
2. Also run Process Explorer to capture all the Dlls getting loaded with Outlook.exe
1. Start Outlook
2. Download and extract Process Explorer from
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx>
3. Double-click Procexp.exe
4. On the View menu make sure "Show lower pane" is checked.
5. Press CTRL + D
6. In the Process Explorer window, scroll down the list of files and then select Outlook.exe.
7. On the File menu click Save As
8. Save Outlook.exe.txt to your desktop and send it to me.
9. We will analyze the log file and check for any 3rd party Dlls.
10. If any 3rd party Dlls are present, we will disable/uninstall the associated application and check for the issue

Scenario 3: User logging on to multiple Outlook client machines
1. Check if user logs on to other Outlook client machines
2. If yes, the Sniffer lock will be moved to this Outlook client
3. If she doesn’t access her mailbox from multiple Outlook client, please ignore this scenario

Canon Printer, Email and Exchange 2007

2009-03-09T14:55:00Z

Morning all,

Quite an interesting one this...

In Exchange 2003 a printer may have worked fine, however when moving to E2k7 this no longer works. Scouring the Internet it seems there are a few people who have this issue.

To get such an anonymouns connection properly in E2k7 we need a receive connector.

This blog link talks about how we need to add the ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender to the connector

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/28/432013.aspx

However if we look at the SMTP protocol log for the recevie connector we see that we are getting a 501 5.1.3 Invalid Address

Interesting....

http://support.microsoft.com//kb/944302 explains here that E2k7 is less tolerant than E2k3 of a Mail From: that is not formatted as it would like.

Hope that helps some people!

New WM emulator images! 6.1.4

2009-02-26T12:50:00Z

Excited? I am... very

looking at some internal training on the new beauty of the WM OS's

You (and I) will be very happy to know that new versions are avaible at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1A7A6B52-F89E-4354-84CE-5D19C204498A&displaylang=en

Enjoy...

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is not supported on this operating system...

2009-01-27T17:48:00Z

After the 2nd install of SP2 for W2k3 and after installing all the prereqs for DPM on my W2k3 SP2 VM I had had enough of it not installing.

After a quick read it seems you cant have DPM on a machine that is a DC.... Doh