Over the past 25 years, SBSfaq.com has grown into far more than a blog. It became a trusted resource for IT professionals across the globe, especially those supporting SMBs. From troubleshooting guides and PowerShell scripts to deep dives into Microsoft technologies, the site has helped thousands of people solve real-world problems.

I’m incredibly proud of what SBSfaq.com has achieved — and deeply grateful to everyone who visited, shared, and contributed over the years.

But as technology evolves, so must we.

Today, I’m announcing that SBSfaq.com will be gracefully sunset as I shift focus to my new venture: The Cyber Advisory.

Why the change?

The challenges facing SMBs and MSPs have changed dramatically. Cybersecurity is no longer a niche concern, it’s a business-critical priority. And while the tools have become more powerful, the risks have become more complex.

The Cyber Advisory is built to meet this moment. It offers:

• Face-to-face cybersecurity training that helps teams build a positive security culture
• Practical advisory services tailored to SMBs and MSPs
• A strong foundation in the SMB1001 framework, with alignment to Essential Eight.

This new direction is about making cybersecurity accessible, actionable, and actually useful for the people who need it most.

What happens next?

SBSfaq.com will remain online for a while longer as an archive in read only mode, but no new content will be added. I’m still seeing several hundred people a week finding content I’ve written over the years as being useful and valuable, so I’ll keep it alive as long as I can. All future writing, training, and resources will be published through The Cyber Advisory via it’s various resources or via my personal blog Wayne Small | Technology Evangelist

If you’ve found value in SBSfaq.com over the years, I invite you to join me on this next chapter. Let’s continue the mission, with a sharper focus and a renewed purpose.

You can follow us here on LinkedIn – http://linkedin.com/company/thecyberadvisory

The new website is being built as we speak and will be at https://www.thecyberadvisory.com.au in the next few weeks.

Thank you for being part of the journey.

Wayne Small
Founder, SBSfaq.com & The Cyber Advisory

The Stellar Toolkit for Exchange is in fact a combination of 5 separate tools that they provide.

•         Stellar Repair for Exchange

•         Stellar Converter for EDB

•         Stellar Converter for OST

•         Stellar Extractor for Exchange Backup

•         Stellar Password Recovery for MS Exchange

You can find more info on the product itself here – https://www.stellarinfo.com/email-tools/exchange-toolkit.php

This review will focus on the Converter for EDB portion of the toolkit.

You can easily download and install the toolkit direct from their website.  Installation for me was no problem at all and very fast. When the install completed it automatically launched into the program itself.

Firstly I grabbed a copy of my Exchange EDB file from my now dead Exchange server and copied it to a hard drive on my desktop PC.

My Exchange server that died had 4 databases. I knew which user I needed the information for, but not which database they resided in.

I then ran the Extract Mailbox option (above) and selected Offline EDB (below)

The Select EDB file allowed me to select all 4 EDB files that I had available.

It then displayed for me the contents of the selected EDB file. Unfortunately the mailbox I wanted was not in this file, so I had to go and reselect another file to find which EDB contained the mailbox I wanted to recover. It would have been great if it had allowed ALL of the selected EDBs to be displayed at once, as it would make the processing of my tasks a lot easier. Maybe a feature for future product releases.

Once I found the database I needed to extract from, it was EASY to expand that users mailbox and select a specific folder. It takes a few minutes while it processes the specific folder you’ve expanded as in the case of this mailbox there were quite a number of mails in it.

When you did this it showed you the contents of that folder in the right hand pane. 

You can select an individual message and it will display the content of it for you. This is super helpful if all you need is a single email recovered.  For my purpose however I wanted to export this users entire mailbox to PST.  To do that you can right select on the specific user you want and select SAVE AS PST.

I had Outlook open at the time and therefore got a warning message to close Outlook which I did.

You can then easily select the destination where you want the recovered email to be and the processing of the mailbox started.

The recovery process was pretty fast, and took 9 minutes to recover the 2.2GB of mail from the mailbox. Part of this speed might be due to the speed of my machine (12th Gen Intel Corei9-12900k with NVMe SSD) but to be honest my CPU and disk were not being hit that hard, so I suspect the product is just straight up fast at processing.

One recovered, I was left with the PST as below. You can see they even thing to give the folder structure a name to show when the recovery ran. A nice touch and very important during any DR situation.

One thing you want to be mindful of when doing a recovery that might affect the data you get back. Your Endpoint AV scanner will be scanning the temp folder location whilst the recovery is running. If there are malware infected items in the emails being recovered, it will be seen by the AV scanning process and will be blocked. This is not a fault of the Stellar tool, but more the way your system needs to be configured IF you are purposely trying to recover an infected file from a backup.  If that is the case then you will need to exclude the temporary location from ANY AV scan. You can specify the TEMP folder location when you first select the EDB for recovery.

Recovering Multiple Mailboxes

For the next task I wanted to extract multiple mailboxes, as if I was recovering from the failure of an entire server.  I opened another database, selected multiple mailboxes to extract.

Here is where the product is not so intuitive. I tried to right click to Export those mailboxes to PST but that only exports the one you right select on.  To export multiple mailboxes, you need to select the SAVE button at the top ribbon bar. Once you do this you will see a dialog box as below that allows you to select various options including saving direct into Office 365 which would be an awesome recovery feature to get someone up and running ASAP.

Once you select the Save as PST you can then get a couple more dialog boxes before being shown this screen where you can then select the priority of each mailbox.  In this one I have set the Treetops mailbox to be one I want back first.

Now while it’s running, it will show the progress status of all mailboxes, and when each one is completed the status changes to Completed in green.

Finally – the recovered mailboxes are done – these were all small mailboxes and the recovery took just minutes to complete, so fast in fact I barely got the screenshot above before it was done.

Review Summary

Overall, I was impressed with this product in every way.  It was dead easy to install it and get running. I’ve worked with other products in the past that require you to install other pre-requisites before they work. This product didn’t need any of that it just worked!

Also impressive was the speed with which is was able to recover the email and ease with which I was able to do it.

The feedback I’d give them is to make it more obvious when you want to export multiple mailboxes how to do that, given you can right select on things normally, I would have expected that to work. Having said that it’s a minor blemish on an otherwise excellent product.

I hope that this review helps others that might need to recover mail from Exchange databases in future!

In the older Teams Client as you can see below, there’s the + sign that you can use to add extra content to a given teams channel.

In the new Teams Preview there is no such thing

The fix for now is to use the web browser to add whatever content you want, and then it will appear in the Teams Preview client.

Hope this helps!

Right now in the new Teams preview, the Join at Team or Create a Team + sign has moved from the bottom of the screen up near the top of the teams area. When you click on it, it only shows Join Team as per the screenshot below there is no Create a Team option.

At first I thought maybe I had messed up permissions, but when I checked in multiple organisations that I belong to, it was the same in all of them. I reverted back to the older Teams client and sure enough the ability to Create a Team was there (as below) so I knew it was not a permissions issue.

For now – the workaround I’ve used is to use the Web Browser to create the new team. You can of course switch back to the old Teams client on your PC or use the Teams client on your iPhone/iPad to create the team.

As we know – this is PREVIEW, therefore there are likely to be more features missing. That is after all the point of previews, so they can debug and get things right.

According to a report by the Australian Cyber Security Centre, cybercrime is on the rise in Australia, with businesses being a prime target. In fact, 58% of businesses in Australia experienced a cyber incident in 2019, with the average cost of a cyber incident being $276,323. Data loss was one of the most common consequences of a cyber incident, highlighting the importance of having a backup in place.

In addition to cyber threats, businesses in Australia also face a high risk of natural disasters. According to a report by the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience and Safer Communities, the cost of natural disasters in Australia is expected to increase to $39 billion per year by 2050. These disasters can cause significant damage to physical infrastructure, including servers and data centres, leading to data loss if there is no backup in place.

Having a backup is crucial for businesses in Australia to protect against data loss from cyber threats and natural disasters. With the increasing amount of data being generated and stored digitally, businesses cannot afford to take data backup lightly. On World Backup Day, it is important for businesses in Australia to evaluate their backup strategies and ensure they are adequately protected against data loss. The consequences of not having a backup can be severe, both in terms of financial loss and damage to reputation.

The questions you need to ask today are;

1. Do you have a backup that works?
2. When was it last tested to show it could restore data?
3. How long did it take to restore the data?

If you can’t answer those questions, then speak to your IT/Technology provider ASAP to get a clearer understanding of your situation and make sure you are protected.

If you need a good IT provider in Australia that focuses on the needs of SMB businesses then let me know. I can link you up with some solid SMB focused IT Professionals via the SMBiT Professionals Association.

One of my biggest issues with Teams vs Slack has been the ability to quickly and easily see notifications across different organisations that you might be joined to. You see with Teams prior to this, you had to phyiscally log out of one organisation and into the other on the desktop client to see if there were any notifications needing attention. This was a major pain for me. It also meant it was one more reason why I used Slack to communicate with multiple organisations as it easily showed me unanswered messages and allowed me to easily flick to that organisation and read/action/respond to anything.

Well today that changes! With the new Teams desktop client, amongst all the other improvements, you can now VERY easily see if there are notifications from other organisations and then switch to that organisation to handle it. Below you can see that I got the notification, and then by selecting the bell, was able to quickly switch to the other organisation and see what else was going on. Love it.

How can I get the new version of Teams desktop client? This depends on your organisations teams update policy. Check out this Microsoft article to give you guidance on how to handle this here.

Hope this helps – it’s one step closer for me to decommissioning my Slack environment and consolidating my tool set to be MS focused more and more.

This attack required a valid username and password for one of the vulnerabilities to be executed. Microsoft have advised in their security guidance to disable RemotePowerShell for non-admins. In their article on Controlling remote PowerShell access to Exchange Servers, Microsoft do clearly show that you should not do this for Admin users, but they give no solution on what to do if you have done this already. I’m also told that the blue box below was not present a few days ago.

This is very valid guidance, HOWEVER, in some of the initial articles floating around have indicated that you should execute the following command to disable it for ALL USERS.

Get-User -ResultSize unlimited | Set-User -RemotePowerShellEnabled:$false

If you have done this command then you will find you now cannot use the Exchange PowerShell Management Console AT ALL. It will an error message showing you that RemotePowerShell is DISABLED for your admin user.

I was reached out to by a client who had executed this and was in a panic. He had run this command on their server, and had issues later getting into the Exchange Management Shell.

He had googled and could not find a solution. There appears to be no information on the Internet on how to resolve this issue. I started digging into it, and I even found the attribute in AD which is set when you manipulate this setting via Powershell commands.

For reference it is the protocolSettings attribute and it has RemotePowerShell set to either 1 for enabled or 0 for disabled.

Now ADSIEdit is a beast of a tool and I use it only as a last resort… THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO USE IT.

The dead simple way around this is even easier.

Given you executed the command on ALL USERS then a newly created user won’t have the issue

Create a new user, make it a member of Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, Schema Admins and the Exchange Organization Admins group.

Login to the Exchange server as the new user and then use the command below to reset the attribute to change RemotePowerShellEnabled to True

Set-User MyAdminUser -RemotePowerShellEnabled:$true

You can now use your original admin account without a problem. You see – sometimes not everything is about using the sledgehammer to crack the nut, sometimes the solution is simple.

Exchange 2016 CU 23

Exchange 2019 CU 12

With it came one minor but potentially troubling change if you are not aware of it. You see Microsoft changed the command line options for doing the /prepareSchema, /prepareAD and /prepareDomain. Prior to this update you would use the those options along with the /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms option if you used scripts to deploy the CU updates.

If you try to do the prepareschema, prepareAD or prepareDomain options it will error with error below “You need to accept the license terms to install Microsoft Exchange Server…”.

Now IF you actually read the rest of the error message it will tell you that the parameter has changed. But if you are relying on scripts that you’ve used for a long time then you might not even see it error.

Post this update you need to use either of the following two options;

/IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataOFF

OR

/IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataON

The reason for this change is that they are now forcing you to decide if you DO or DO NOT want to send diagnostic data to Microsoft.

This subtle but significant change is NOT documented in the release notes above. It is however documented here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/diagnostic-data-exchange-server?view=exchserver-2019 in another article entirely.

Hope that this helps save you as it would have saved me a little time too

The issue is that I’ve got a Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse. Things will be working fine and then suddenly one or both of the devices will stop working. I’ve tried turning the devices on and off again without luck. This problem has been across multiple Windows 10 builds and even still exists on Windows 11 following an inplace upgrade. I was not able to track when or why it would happen. It seemed some days to go for days without an issue and other days it would do so repeatedly and become VERY frustrating.

The only fix I’ve been able to figure out has been to disable and re-enable BlueTooth via Windows Control Panel.

I started to dig into it, and via Device Manager found that Windows had the ability to turn off BlueTooth to save power. Initially I didn’t think this would be an issue as I’ve got the Power Plan set to NOT turn anything off – i.e. High Performance.

I wondered what would happen if I disabled the ability to turn BlueTooth off, so I disabled it and it’s now been 2 weeks without a single issue.

I can’t believe it took me 3 years to dig into this… such a painful issue and yet such a simple fix.

I’m keen to know if others have had this issue too, so let me know in the comments below how this goes for you please.

Here’s a sample of some of the messages you would have seen

Microsoft announce the issue on their blog here stating that it will take several days at least to provide a real patch for it.

In the meantime however you can use the following few lines to quickly disable the Malware Filtering server on your Exchange servers

Get-MalwareFilteringServer | Set-MalwareFilteringServer -BypassFiltering $true
Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

Please note that when you do this, you will bypass any filtering that was taking place, therefore real malware might slip through. Fingers crossed that Microsoft can get this patch sorted sooner than later!