Tom Arbuthnot's Lync'd Up

Lync 2013 client “Network Password Required to Connect” Proxy Issue

2013-05-21T22:09:19Z

I’ve noticed this on a few Lync 2013 deployments (or Lync 2013 clients against Lync 2010 pools) and heard from others, the Lync 2013 client prompts for “network password”, why?

Note, this is not the same as the prompt for Exchange credentials or for Lync Better together sign in.

it seems that (unlike Lync 2010 client as far as I can make out) Lync 2013 client respects the Internet explorer proxy settings (as arguably it should). In many corporate environments a web proxy is setup to restrict web traffic/authenticate users (often to log access against a user).

Lync 2013 client picks up that there is a proxy and when it goes to a site/https web service that is not specifically excluded from the proxy, the proxy challenges for credentials, hence the prompt. Put in your creds and all is well (until your password changes potentially).

Lync client hits a bunch of web services as part of it’s normal operation, so you can reduce the likelihood of seeing this prompt by excluding those addresses from the proxy (or from proxy authentication), names such as

lyncdiscoverinternal.domain.com
lyncdiscover.domain.com
poolname-webint-domain.com (EE Web services)
hostname.domain.com (SE web services)
owa.domain.com (outlook web access/web services)
autodiscover.domain.com (exchange autodiscover)
meet.domain.com
dialin.domain.com

(Obviously use your own judgment for the correct domains for your environment).

Since these are internal addresses it shouldn’t be a big deal to get them excluded from the proxy with a PAC file or excluded from authentication. In fact it takes needless load off the proxy. It’s not the case that Lync 2010 client doesn’t use any of these web services, just that it doesn’t seem to respect the proxy settings. Testing in fiddler shows the proxy challenge and response.

While setting the above addresses to bypass the proxy (or authentication) will reduce the likelihood of being prompted, unfortunately it potentially won’t eliminate the prompt. The 2013 client seems to have some hard coded web lookups to various Microsoft domains (probably for 365 autodiscovery/setup), and even if you find and exclude those (and if someone does with fiddler, please post the list!), if a federated user has a photo set in 2010 to do to a website (internal or public) Lync client will attempt a lookup to pull down the photo via http.

Interested to hear feedback if others are hitting this issue.

Tom

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Tom Arbuthnot is a Microsoft MVP and Senior Consultant at Modality Systems. Tom is actively involved in the global Unified Communications community. He is a founding member of the Microsoft UC User Group London, a contributing writer to Lync Server 2013 Unleashed and is a technical reviewer for Trainsignal. Modality Systems is a UC Centre of Excellence – specializing in strategy, infrastructure, user adoption, managed services and software development.

Installing a New Lync 2010 Pool into an environment with an existing DFS Lync Share

2013-05-21T21:31:39Z

Quick tip, as I’ve hit this a couple of times now. Lync 2010 Server CU4 added the ability to properly support DFS shares for the Lync file share, all good. However when you try to add an additional pool to a Lync environment with a DFS share you may hit an issue at one of two points

Topology builder (if you chose to run it on your new pool/fe/se) will fail to publish
If you modified the topology on a different pool/fe/se/machine, Install Local Configuration store will fail

Error: The ‘ShareName’ attribute is invalid. The value “xxxx” is invalid…

The Fix

Simple fix for this one. After installing the admin tools on the new FE/SE, use the CU patcher to patch them up to the latest CU (or CU4 or above) then both steps in the process will work just fine. Obviously you’ll need to patch again after install to patch the newly installed components.

Tom

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Lync Location Database (LIS) is Not Available Externally via Reverse Proxy

2013-05-13T18:01:18Z

Came across this one on a customer, they have an exclusively “dirty” Wi-Fi, where all Wi-Fi users are external and have to connect to all services via VPN/DMZ/Lync Edge. This model works fine, as long as you scale you edge services ok. However they wanted to set locations based on the LIS, so that when Wi-FI users were in a certain area (based on the AP BSSID) their location would be set.

We set it up and quickly worked out that the LIS service is an internal (on network) only service. LIS is a HTTPS service, and is not available via reverse proxy for external users.

You can see this based on the internal and external Web Services, LIS is not published on the external service. This is the same for Lync 2010 and Lync 2013.

What does this mean

No location services for anyone connecting over “Edge”, for example dirty Wi-Fi, remote users or a small office on edge

Workarounds

Ideally, from a Lync perspective Wi-Fi would be internal, to both remove this issue and to allow more direct paths for media
Users can still input a location manually, and it will be saved locally on that client and re appear each time they are on that network.

This is a little unfortunate as LIS is a “nice to have” for Wi-Fi devices, and it is not uncommon to have a “dirty”/external Wi-Fi for Wi-Fi users, especially in BYOD/mobile scenarios.

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Lync 2013: An error occurred during the screen presentation (KB2760556 issue)

2013-05-13T11:27:10Z

It seems there is an issue with Lync 2013 KB2760556 March Update which causes desktop sharing to fail. We have also noticed that somehow KB2760556 ends up installed twice on some machines, possibly installed once manually, then installed again by windows update. In some situations it has reappeared twice even after being removed.

You can quickly check for duplicate install issue in PowerShell,

Get-HotFix | Where-Object {$_.HotFixID -like “*556*”}

It seems if you uninstall KB2760556 (twice if you need to as above), reboot then reinstall it works, or sometimes uninstall KB2760556 then reinstall February Update KB2760512 then KB2760556

Others have reported the issue and other combos of uninstalling and reinstalling the patch have worked for them:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/de-DE/lyncconferencing/thread/71fca51a-64ed-41c3-8079-0f290588a716

Tom

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Lync 2013 Gotcha, When adding/removing FE’s in Topology, Publishing Topology will Reset the Relevant Pool

2013-04-22T21:58:55Z

Just a quick post of a “gotcha” in Lync 2013. Due to the way Windows Fabric works, it is recommended to add one FE at a time during deployments, otherwise you might hit a quorum issue and have your pool not want to start.

When going to add an FE in Topology you will get this warning:

Fair enough, I need to restart all the machines in the pool at some point. I’ll my FE to the pool in topology, and go to Publish the topology

What’s that! Topology has Reset the pool for me, without warning. I read the above as “I” will need to do this at some point in the future, not we’re going to do it for you when you publish topology and interrupt service for the pool.

Bottom line, if you are building, adding or removing FE’s to Lync 2013 pool, be ready for service interruptions, and preferable move users to another pool until your work is completed and Windows Fabric has settled down. Hopefully, due to the way pools are built one FE at at time, most people will experience this early and understand, but I thought the warning before publishing could have been a little clearer. Easy to get caught out if you think you’ll make the change in topology now and deploy the server later (again in 2013 it’s recommended you deploy quickly after changing topology to keep the quorum correct).

Also, side note, if you don’t run Topology as administrator, you might see this error. Basically always run the Lync tools as administrator.

Error: An error occurred: “Microsoft.Rtc.Management.Deployment.DeploymentException” “Cannot query configuration for service “RtcSrv”. Details: Access is denied. Verify that your user account has administrative privileges, and that you selected “Run as administrator” when you started Windows PowerShell.”

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Microsoft Q3 2013: #Lync revenue grew over 30% again, 90 of the Fortune 100 use Lync

2013-04-19T08:36:37Z

Microsoft’s Q3 2013 results were published on April 18th. Revenue came in just under expectations at $20.49 billion but it beat expectation with an earnings per share of $0.72.

On the Lync front, from the earnings call (my emphasis):

“In terms of our productivity server offerings, we continued to see strength with Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, each growing double digits. Specifically, Lync revenue grew over 30% again this quarter, with excitement around the platform continuing to grow. Ninety of the Fortune 100 companies are now using Lync, and there are more than 5 million seats of enterprise voice deployed. At our Lync 2013 conference in February, we announced that Lync and Skype connectivity for presence, instant messaging and voice will be available to all Lync users by the end of June. Connecting these audiences is a key milestone as we deliver on the promise of truly unified communications.”

So it seems the momentum of Lync continues to grow. With federation becoming increasingly important the fact that such a high proportion of Enterprises are using Lync is important, and the 5 million EV seats is good to see too. Now we are getting underway with the new features in Lync Server 2013 I’m sure it’s a trend that is set to continue.

Sources:

Microsoft Earnings Release FY13 Q3

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

70 #Lync Technical, Business and Partner Videos from LyncConf now available Free!

2013-04-17T20:10:52Z

70 Videos and PowerPoint presentations, covering a Technical, Business and Partner tracks from LyncConf 2013 are now available free of charge to download and keep (mp4 and pptx, registration is required).

I was lucky enough to be at the conference and I can say the content is definitely worth looking at.

Just head over to LyncConf.com and click on “Get Access Now” to see all the session recordings and PowerPoints

The Technical Track videos include:

Common Questions & Concerns about Lync Voice
Planning your Enterprise Voice deployment
Starting with Lync Custom Applications: where to begin?
Lync Server 2013: High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Planning Conferencing in Lync 2013
Voice Interoperability Fundamentals
Deploying Conferencing in Lync 2013
Lync Mobile Devices and Wi-Fi
System Center Advisor and Automated Diagnostics for Lync
Deploying Voice in Lync Server 2013
Forget about IT: How about Lync in your business applications!
Lync Server 2013 – Mobility Deep Dive: Architecture, Deployment and Management
Managing Lync for IM, Presence & Conferencing
Monitoring Lync – ensuring optimal performance in operations
Enterprise Network Requirements for Lync Server 2013
Lync and Exchange – Better Together
Managing Voice in Lync Server 2013
PowerShell Boot Camp
A Lap Around Persistent Chat
All about Archiving with Lync Server 2013
Edge Server Design and Planning Considerations
Lync 2013 Video Conferencing & Interoperability
Lync Server 2013 Dial Plan and Voice Routing Deep Dive
Advanced Automation & Scripting in Lync Server 2013
Advanced Voice Interoperability
Be on the cutting edge in Customer Care with Lync and Skype!
Managing Large Meetings with Microsoft Lync 2013
Persistent Chat Deep Dive: Deployment, Architecture and Management

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Test-CsPstnPeerToPeerCall Known Bug: “Expected DTMF Tones to be received within 10 seconds”

2013-04-15T21:35:03Z

A quick note that there is a known bug in the Test-CsPstnPeerToPeerCall in Lync Server 2010 and 2013. When testing with certain gateways (such as Sonus SBC 1000 and 2000), you may see the following response

PS C:\> Test-CsPstnPeerToPeerCall –TargetFqdn pool1.domain.com

RunspaceId : c80a2c5f-0659-4081-b88c-54ccfe18f395
TargetFqdn : pool1.domain.com
Result     : Failure
Latency    : 00:00:03.3379616
Error      : Expected DTMF Tones to be received within 10 seconds.

This issue occurs because the volume value of the dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) digits in the test cmdlet is too low. This doesn’t affect all gateways, some, such as the Cisco ISR, will pass. The reason it works with some gateways and not others is that the digit detection level are different. With UX the digit detection level is -34db. Setting it lower can cause other issues such as false detections

We can see the volume level in a Wireshark trace, with the RTP EVENTS

The cmdlet sends a bunch of “#” DTMF tones that it expects the gateway to return them, proving the gateway is working. However the volume level is –53.

-53 is not valid per RFC2833 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2833.txt), this is directly from the RFC:

volume: For DTMF digits and other events representable as tones, this field describes the power level of the tone, expressed in dBm0 after dropping the sign. Power levels range from 0 to -63 dBm0. The range of valid DTMF is from 0 to -36 dBm0 (must accept); lower than -55 dBm0 must be rejected (TR-TSY-000181, ITU-T Q.24A).

Interestingly acceptable volume levels were changed in RFC4733 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4733), which obsoletes RFC 2833,

For DTMF digits and other events representable as tones, this field describes the power level of the tone, expressed in dBm0 after dropping the sign. Power levels range from 0 to -63 dBm0

<snip>

(Note: A preferred level range for digital tone generators is -8 dBm0 to -3 dBm0.)

So even though the level is legal as per RFC4733, it is miles off the preferred volume range of –8 to –3 dB.

Actual in Call DTMF tones in Lync are sent at a much higher volume, so present no issue, it’s only the test cmdlet that is impacted, so it may flag false errors in SCOM synthetic transactions.

The issue was supposed to be fixed in Lync Server 2010 CU4, but evidently was not

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2621842?wa=wsignin1.0

I believe it’s on the to fix list, but no eta. I’ve endeavour to update this post when the issue is fixed

Tom

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Unleashed Book/eBook Now Available

2013-04-14T14:34:21Z

Just wanted to note that Lync Server 2013 Unleashed book/ebook is now available. It comes from 4 great core authors, Alex Lewis, Tom Pacyk, David Ross and Randy Wintel. I also contributed a chapter to the book (but don’t let that stop you buying it )

I work alongside Alex and Randy at Modality Systems so know well everyone involved in the book knows what they are talking about.

You can get the book physically, or kindle from amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Lync-Server-Unleashed-Edition/dp/0672336154/

Or direct from SAMS/Pearson (EPUB, MOBI and PDF), you can frequently Google for informit discount codes too.

http://www.informit.com/store/microsoft-lync-server-2013-unleashed-9780672336157

While I am recommending books I’d also like to mention PowerShell Deep Dives. It’s a PowerShell book written by loads of key figures in the Powershell community, (Jeffery Hicks, Richard Siddaway, Oisin Grehan, and Aleksandar Nikolic, Don Jones, Arnaud Petitjean, Boe Prox, Bartek Bielawski, Mike Robbins, Vadims Podans, Ashley McGlone, James O’Neill, Jeff Wouters, Jonathan Medd, Adam Driscoll, Trevor Sullivan, Josh Gavant, Karl Prosser, Jim Christopher, Ben Miller, Donabel Santos, Robert C. Cain, Jason Helmick, Matthew Reynolds, and Chris Bellée),

Each author is writing a complete chapter on different practical PowerShell topics.

It’s not yet finally published, but it’s on mannings MEAP early access program, and from what I have read so far is definitely worth a look.

http://www.manning.com/hicks/

Tom

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Microsoft UC User Group London, April 25th from 6pm

2013-04-12T13:36:40Z

Reminder that we have a MUCUGL coming up in a couple of weeks, it would be great to see you there.

First up Justin will be giving a deep dive into the new Lync 2013 mobility architecture and cover how everything talks to each other and fits together. Next up, I will be giving an overview and a demo of the new Lync 2013 centralised logging features, which allow us to seamlessly log across all Lync 2013 servers for a specific user or workload. No more dashing between front ends starting and stopping the logging tool.

Then we’ll take a bit of a break for networking, then Adam will give an overview of some new Polycom products and features for Lync, and a general update of a lot of great new community content and tools that have been released since our last community update.

As usual, we’ll be heading to the pub after, we look forward to seeing you there.

Registration at Eventbrite.

Where: Polycom Executive Experience Centre, 16th Floor Dashwood House, 69 Old Broad St London

Nearest Tube: Liverpool Street

When: 6pm, April 25th 2013

Author information

Tom Arbuthnot

Senior Consultant at Modality Systems

Tom Arbuthnot's Lync'd Up

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