Tech F1

I am back!

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 11:22:00 +0000

Hi All.

Firstly, my deepest apologies for not putting any new posts for the last 3 years! A lot was happening back then and I just got too busy to publish. This year has been quite busy as well, especially because I joined a new company ;)

Time is a horse that no one can tame, it just keeps on running ... running away. I had meant to put up a post last December, but got busy, and one thing led to another and next thing I know, it is the start of July!

I will try to pickup momentum as time goes, starting with one post a month, and maybe increasing it to two a month.

As always, if there is anything that you would like me to cover, feel free to email me at nivleshc@yahoo.com and I will do my best to accommodate it.

By-the-way, if you are in the Southern hemisphere, and you were to look towards North-West just after sunset, you will see two bright objects, one much brighter and bigger than the other. The bigger and brighter of the two objects is Venus and the other Jupiter! Visually, one could easily conclude that Venus is so much bigger than Jupiter, but that is as far from the truth as you can go. Jupiter is the biggest of the planets in our Solar system, and one can go as far as to say that its huge gravity has made our solar system what it is today! However, it is much further away from us while Venus is very close, reason why it looks much bigger. Last night, the two were so close, you could not tell them apart, however tonight they are further apart and will keep getting so for the nights to come. Saturn can be found close to the Scorpion constellation.

Did anyone get affected by the leap second that was added at midnight UTC on 1st July? (the UTC clocks ticked from 30/06/2015 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 and then to 01/07/2015 00:00:00). The addition of that extra second was done due to the fact that earth's rotation is getting slower, which means a day measured using earth's rotation is getting longer. You can read more about the leap second wikipedia.

Also, while on the topic of Astronomy and Space, New Horizons, the space probe which was launched in 2006 to do a flyby of Pluto, is getting closer and closer as we speak to its goal. It will do a flyby of Pluto on the 14th of July, 2015, providing lots of information and photos of Pluto and its moon Charon. Previous to New Horizons, the best photo of Pluto was a pixellated image by Hubble. However, now that New Horizons has started transmitting photos, it is amazing to see the blocky pictures of Pluto turn into circles! Check out the latest photos on www.space.com

Though it might be late, but then again, it is never to late to wish you all a very happy New Year. Here's to lots of posts this year .. and to the awesome photos of Pluto and Charon in the coming weeks!

Samsung Galaxy S3 Launch in Sydney on 31/05/12

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 31 May 2012 00:36:00 +0000

Here is the live stream url for this.

http://blog.vodafone.com.au/blog/live-stream-at-950am-thursday-31-may-2012/

Transfer Contacts from Blackberry Torch to iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 24 May 2012 03:26:00 +0000

I hate to say this, but nowadays more people are ditching their blackberries for the iPhone or Android devices.

I recently had a request from a user who had been happily using a Blackberry Torch. He had just bought an iPhone 4S and wanted to know how he could move all his contacts to his new phone. I took this to be an easy task to do, but as I found a few minutes later, this was going to be quite a challenge. I found that I could not bulk copy the contacts onto the sim and move the sim across to the iPhone. The Blackberry Torch did not have any option to bulk copy contacts!! With at least 200 contacts, I did not want to waste a few days just moving contacts around, so I decided to find a better solution.

And here it is.
1. Create a gmail account (unless you already have one)
2. Download Google Sync onto your Blackberry Torch.
3. Sign in to your Google Sync using your Gmail Credentials from step 1. above
4. You will then be asked to sync your contacts to Gmail. Change the frequency to Manual.
5. Do a sync of the contacts so that all contacts are uploaded to Gmail.
6. Once this is complete, login to your Gmail account
7. Go into Contacts. Under More, you will see the Export option. Click this.
8. Choose the following settings for Exporting Contacts

- All Contacts
- vCard format (for importing into Apple Address Book or another application)

9. Once you have done this, you will get a file with all your contacts in it.

Now we will import this into your iPhone. To do this, we will login to your iCloud account.
Please note that to get an iCloud account, you will need to be running at least iOS 5.0 on your iPhone. If you have not already done so, please create an iCloud account.

10. Login to your iCloud account using your browser by going to http://www.icloud.com
11. From the dashboard, click on Contacts (you might be asked to install the iCloud Web App Plugin) Click Install for this.
12. Once you are in your iCloud contacts section, at the bottom you will see a spiked wheel icon. This is your settings icon. Click on it and choose Import vCard
13. You will then get a popup asking you for the location of the vCard file. Point it to the file that you exported from Gmail (Step 9)
14. Once the import is finished, Viola! Your contacts would have been uploaded to iCloud.
15. Ensure your iPhone has been setup to Sync its contacts with iCloud. If it has then all your imported Gmail Contacts will now show on your iPhone.

Yay!! How easy was that?

Samsung unveils Samsung Galaxy S III .. well ahead of the rumored iPhone 5 launch

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:31:00 +0000

Have you been caught in the rivalry between Apple and Samsung? It seems like a neck-to-neck battle between these two giants, with Apple backing its iOS device that revolutionised the mobile market some years ago, and Samsung pushing itself into the mobile market with Android (the mobile flagship OS of Google).

As most of you might be already aware, when the Samsung Galaxy SII came out, many took it to be the iPhone killer. With such close similarity to iPhone 4, it is no wonder why this phone has been so popular. Even so because it is so easy to use and with the loads of apps and hardware features it contains, it is a must have.

There are rumors that Apple is set to release its next iPhone in the coming months. This will surely be a must see product since it will be the first iPhone that would truely be released under the reins of Tim Cook. Will it have a bigger screen? NFC chip? Faster processor? A newer look?

Well ahead of the iPhone 5 launch, Samsung has unveiled its next installment in the Galaxy S series. The Samsung Galaxy SIII was unveiled in UK not too long ago. From first looks it seems like a marriage between Samsung Galaxy SII and Samsung Nexus. Unlike its predecessor, the new Galaxy SIII has got a more polished edge (like the Nexus). It boasts a quad core processor and has got Android 4.0 installed (Ice Cream Sandwich).

Currently the Samsung Galaxy SIII has only been announced for UK and Europe markets but the company has announced that other countries will soon follow.

Will you be rushing out to buy this new phone? Or will you wait till the next iPhone is released to decide which one to get?

You can read more about Samsung Galaxy SIII at the following websites

Tech Jungle
Sydney Morning Herald
Engadget

Get-PublicFolderStatistics - Couldn't find public folder on server

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:03:00 +0000

Using the Exchange Management Shell in Exchange 2010, if you try to get the statistics of a Public Folder PFolder on server ExchangeServer01 using the cmdlet Get-PublicFolderStatistics, you might get an error like the following

Get-PublicFolderStatistics PFolder -server ExchangeServer01

Couldn't find public folder {PFolder} on server {ExchangeServer01}

+ CategoryInfo : InvalidData: (PFolder :PublicFolderIdParameter) [Get-PublicFolderStatistics], InvalidOperationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : 785BD1AB,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.MapiTasks.GetPublicFolderStatistics

This seems to be a bug since the PublicFolder "PFolder" does exist!

A workaround for this is to add the parameters -ResultSize unlimited to the cmdlet. So modifying the above example with the new parameters,

Get-PublicFolderStatistics PFolder -server ExchangeServer01 -ResultSize unlimited

gives the correct results.

I hope this helps people since it surely had me baffled for a while.

The above is from http://mykbit.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/couldn-find-public-folderwhen-get.html

ec2-107-21-251-69.compute-1.amazonaws.com what is this?

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:55:00 +0000

I had a user come up to me this week with a very weird issue. They had a jailbroken iphone and ever since a few weeks ago, it had been freezing on him. Well my first reply was, thats what you get when you jailbreak an iPhone ;) Actually jailbreaking an iPhone gives you a lot of freedom to do things on it.

Anyways, I looked through the phone and did not find anything odd on it. I then enabled a ssh server on it and connected. I decided to check if the phone was doing any weird tcp connections.

Doing a netstat revealed all. In between the "normal" traffic was one that I had not seen before. ec2-107-21-251-69.compute-1.amazonaws.com
It seemed that connection to this destination was always kept alive. Since the version of netstat on the iPhone does not have options to reveal the PID of the offending process, I was at a loss.

I googled the above address and managed to find some articles that linked it to Viber (this is like Skype). Since SBSetting was already installed on the iPhone, I looked through the currently running processes and found Viber listed. I killed it, and presto! The connection to ec2-107-21-251-69.compute-1.amazonaws.com was no more!

The iPhone was still slow so in the end, the best solution was to install the legit iOS on it :(

The cluster service has determined that this node does not have the latest copy of cluster configuration data

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:36:00 +0000

A few days ago I got a big surprise on my Exchange 2010 Servers. While doing a routine daily check via Exchange Management Console, I noticed that one of my DAG servers was reporting its status as Failed. This looked really weird since the server itself was online and I could ping it.

I RDP'd to the problematic server and checked the eventlogs. To my dismay, I found that the following was being logged in the system logs

Event ID 1564 - File share witness resource 'File Share Witness (\\Server1.domain.com\DAG.domain.com)' failed to arbitrate for the file share '\\Server1.domain.com\DAG.domain.com'. Please ensure that file share '\\Server1.domain.com\DAG.domain.com' exists and is accessible by the cluster.

I opened the Failover Cluster Manager and found that the above server had been marked as down. This explained why the server was being reported with a status of Failed in the Exchange Management Console.

I checked the permissions on the DAG share above. The NTFS permissions looked alright. However, the share permissions had an unresolved SID. I took this to be the culprint and doing a bit of googling I found that the cluster computer account should be listed in the share permissions with Full Control. Since this was not listed, I took the liberty of adding in DAG$ in the share permissions with Full Control (my DAG name is called DAG .. yea yea very original).

After doing the above, I noticed that the above error was no longer being shown, but instead the following error appeared.
"Event ID 1561 The cluster service has determined that this node does not have the latest copy of cluster configuration data."

And to add salt to my injury, the server was still marked as down in Failover Cluster Manager. I googled the error and managed to find some articles on it. One of the support articles from Microsoft said to start all the other nodes and if they started, then the affected node will read the configuration off them and start. However, since I already had a node running (the other DAG server), this didnt quite apply.

I tried restarting the cluster services on the affected server, but even this did not resolve the issue. Restarting the server was no help either.

Finally, with a stroke of genius (and luck), I decided to restart the cluster. So from the Failover Cluster Manager, I right clicked on the cluster name (which quite originally was called dag.domain.com) and then under More Actions I selected Shut down Cluster. A prompt came up asking if I really wanted to shut down the cluster. I chose Yes.

After a few minutes (well actually 2min), with fingers crossed, I started the cluster (from Failover Cluster Manager, right click on the DAG name and from More Actions select Start Cluster). Viola, both the DAG servers came back online!

I quickly checked Exchange Management Console and saw that both the servers were now being reported as online. The problematic server was now being updated from the other server (you might see a huge CPU spike on the problematic server while the updates are copied to it)

Take care and until the next time. And remember, with windows, you restart :)

Exchange 2010 Service Unavailable during SMTP transactions. Exchange Server is not accepting any incoming emails

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:44:00 +0000

I must say that my dear old friend Murphy paid me a visit this week. For those of you that are unaware of Murphy, you can get more information here . Basically Murphy's Law says that "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"

Anyway, not to get side tracked. This week, one of my legacy Exchange Servers (Exchange 2003) broke down. Or that was what it seemed superficially. I am still trying to work through the migration of my Exchange 2003 servers to Exchange 2010. I still have a handful of users left on my legacy server and so am trying my best to move them across. As it happened, on this day, users on my Exchange 2010 started receiving Delay notifications when sending emails to users on Exchange 2003. Users on Exchange 2003 were also receiving the same when they tried sending emails to anyone on Exchange 2010 or to those outside the organisation.

I checked the queues and found that the Exchange 2003 queues were increasing with time and Exchange 2010 queues with emails destined to Exchange 2003 were suffering from the same fate.

My first reaction was that network issues might have cropped up, causing havoc between Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2003. Since Exchange 2003 was configured to deliver emails using Exchange 2010 for out-of-organization recipients, this theory made perfect sense. But then when I checked the network connectivity between the two servers, there did not seem to be any problems :(

I then looked at the SMTP logs on Exchange 2003. To my surprise I found that one of the things logged was "Service Unavailable". This meant that the Exchange 2010 CAS server was not receiving emails. I opened up a command line and tried connecting to the Exchange 2010 SMTP service, but after the handshake, I also received "Service Unavailable".

I RDP'd to my Exchange 2010 CAS server and checked the event logs. To my surprise I found that it was throttling the incoming email transactions. This was because the used diskspace on the disk that stores the queues had gone beyond 94%. This is known as BackPressure.

The simple solution was to find and remove all unnecessary files on the Exchange 2010 CAS server to bring the free diskspace up. As I looked through the eventlogs I saw Exchange reporting that the load on the resources had lessened and as such the limitations on the incoming queues was being removed.

Phew!. I forced the messages in the retry queues in both Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2003 and watched as the numbers reduced.

For those of you that would like to read more on Exchange 2010 Back Pressure, you can click through to the following articles
Technet - Understanding Back Pressure
MSExchange.org Back Pressure in Exchange 2010

I would recommend the MSExchange Article ;)

Icons have disappeared from Desktop in Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Dont you just love it when simple things take more of your time than you actually anticipate? Well I had one of those moments just days ago.

The issue was that a user complained that when he turned on his machine in the morning, all his desktop icons mysteriously disappeared. I was a abit skeptical at first since he assured me that he had not changed anything. So I remotely connected to his computer, and found that he wasnt telling fibs. The icons had literally disappeared and all that was left was the desktop wallpaper.

At first I thought his user profile would be corrupted so thought to give it a simple test. I right clicked on the desktop and created a new text document. The process went through without any errors but the new icon failed to show on the desktop. I checked his user profile folder to see if the icon had been created. This can be found using the environment variable %userprofile%. So I looked at %userprofile%\desktop and found that a new text document had been created although it didnt show on the desktop. Ahem. Time for some head scratching.

Doing a quick search on the internet revealed the answer to me, and when I realised how simple it was, I could have almost kicked myself (but then I thought otherwise :) )

Anyways to get to the point, all I needed to do was the following

1. Right click on the Desktop and then click on View
2. A sub menu will show and there check to see if Show desktop icons is ticked. In my case it wasnt.
3. Click the Show desktop icons option and then when you return to the desktop, all your icons would have returned
4. You can click the Show desktop icons option again to hide the icons

Viola! Didnt I tell you that it was soo simple ;)

The above solution (and the image above) was copied from http://www.thewindowsclub.com/desktop-icons-not-showing-windows-7

Turn OFF the reading pane in Outlook

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:16:00 +0000

One of my users recently asked me a very odd question - How to turn off the Reading Pane in Outlook.

He told me that when viewing Public Folders, if he turned off the Reading Pane in one folder, when going to the next, it would automatically turned on. This issue was causing him lots of frustration.

I found that the answer to this question is not inside Outlook but in how Outlook is started. In simple terms, outlook needed to be started with the /nopreview flag.

Follow these steps to create a shortcut on your desktop to start Outlook with the Reading Pane turned off.

1. Right Click on your desktop and then select New and then Shortcut
2. In the window that comes up, browse to where Outlook.exe is stored on your computer
(Default location for Outlook 2007 is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe)
3. Once you have located Outlook.exe, in the path that is displayed, append "/nopreview" (without any quotes) to it.

So taking Outlook 2007 as an example, the location of the item will be
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /nopreview

4. Click next and enter a name for this shortcut (Outlook reading pane off)

That is all that is required. Now if you need to start Outlook and not have to keep on turning off the reading pane, just start Outlook using the new shortcut that you have just created on the desktop.

I found the above at http://usfsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3313/~/turn-off-the-reading-pane-for-all-outlook-2007-folders

You can visit http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-outlook-2007-HP001218589.aspx for a complete list of command line switches for Outlook 2007

Upgrade to iOS 5 is causing a faster drain of the battery

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:26:00 +0000

After contemplating for a week, I finally decided to upgrade my iPhone 3Gs from 4.2.3 to iOS 5.0. After a very uneventful 20 minutes(I mean this in a nice way), my iPhone was upgraded to the newer and flashier iOS 5.0. There are alot of features bundled in this upgrade (200+) though I did notice that now my iPhone seems to be a bit sluggish compared to the previous iOS.

Another thing I noticed was that my phone's battery kept on draining out faster than before. Where previously I would charge my iPhone once a day, I was now doing it twice a day! The only reason I could put to this behaviour was the recent upgrade to iOS 5. Searching on the internet, I found lots of users having similar issues. The difference though, was that they were using the new iPhone 4S while I was using iPhone 3Gs. However, saying that, they both were running iOS 5. Bingo!

Some websites reported that the degraded battery life on iPhone 4S was due to a bug in the way Location Services was checking and setting the Time Zone. The bug resulted in Location Services doing this task abit too often, which resulted in the higher battery drain. Turning off the automatic setting of Time Zone in Location Services was a fix that many recommended.

I decided to give the same fix a go on my iPhone. The steps are listed below.
1. Open up Settings in your iPhone
2. Locate Location Services and then tap it to open it
3. Navigate to the end of the screen till you see System Services. Tap this to open it
4. In the screen that shows now, turn off Setting Time Zone by sliding the button beside it to OFF.
(for good measure, I turned off Location-Based iAds as well)

Doing the above restored my iPhone to the similar (if not same) battery life that I had before the upgrade.

The fix above should work for any iPhone running iOS 5.

Hope this brings relief to others that had batteries running empty sooner than expected.

Happy Diwali and a Prosperous New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:50:00 +0000

On this auspicious occasion, I would like to wish each and everyone of you a very Happy Diwali and a Prosperous New Year. Enjoy the sweets and savories with loved ones and make merry of this special day, a day that has been held special for generations.

For those that would like to know more about this special occasion, here is a wikipedia article on Diwali

Remote Desktop Client Asks for Login Username and Password - How to Disable this

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:33:00 +0000

Generally with time, newer versions of software get released. These releases are necessary to fix issues in the previous version and also to add new features.

However, sometimes the new features are not necessarily easily adopted. This can be quite evident when you have to re-learn what you have got into a habit of. Tell me, how many of your users (including you?) cried when trying to find the print button once you moved to Office 2010?

Remote Desktop Client (RDP) is one of the most used tools for any IT Admin. It gives you an easy way to connect to a server/computer without physically having to be there. But as of version 6, whenever you try to login to any server, before the client even initiates the connection, it prompts for the username and password. Now this can be ok, but at times you would rather enter the credentials at the logon prompt that the server shows on its desktop... well at least there are times when I would like that :)

I found how to do this using a tweak done on the default.rdp file. I thought I would share this so that others could benefit from it as well.

1. Locate the Default.rdp (located in your My Documents folder) file and open it in Notepad.
2. Add a line with the following
enablecredsspsupport:i:0
3. Default.rdp should now look something like below
redirectposdevices:i:0
authentication level:i:0
enablecredsspsupport:i:0
prompt for credentials:i:0
negotiate security layer:i:1
3. Save the file and then exit from Notepad

Now when you start RDP, you will not be prompted for your credentials.

Hope this comes in handy for those that have been nagged by this feature.
[the full document describing this tweak can be found here

Where are attachments opened inside Outlook Stored?

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:05:00 +0000

One of my users had received a document via email and for some reason instead of saving the document and then editing it, he opened it straight out of Outlook and started updating it. Having lost documents in the past due to not saving them continuously, he kept on saving his edits every 5 minutes. 2 hours later, when he finished updating the document, he closed it and went for lunch.

On his return, to his amazement, he could not locate the word document. After about 5 minutes, he realised that instead of saving the document to his computer first, he had started working straight from the email :(

Now how many of you have come across similar situations? Well, the mere fact that you are able to save updates to the document means that they ARE BEING SAVED SOMEWHERE. Just where is the mystery :)

Well the short answer is that they are stored in a secure temporary folder. The location depends on the version of Outlook you are running and can be easily found by looking at some registry values.

For Outlook 2010, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security

For Outlook 2007, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Outlook 2003, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security

The actual Microsoft document detailing the above can be found here

Hope this comes in handy

Cannot sign in to Lync. Lync was unable to sign in. Please verify your logon credentials again

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:28:00 +0000

I came across this very weird error when trying to access my Lync Server using our Edge Servers.

To add some background, I was using a non SOE laptop, running Windows 7 64-bit. Below is a description of the problem

1. I started my Microsoft Lync 2010 Client.
2. I entered my sign-in address (my client was set to Automatic Configuration). I clicked on Sign In
3. My client found my server and prompted me for my credentials.
4. I entered my username/password and clicked on Sign In
5. After some time, I got the error shown above.

No matter, how many times I tried entering my password, the same error kept on coming up.

Finally, after some searching I found out that the error was due to a mismatch in NTLM settings between my Lync Server and my client computer. My Lync Server was expecting a 128bit encrypted secure session from the client but my client was not doing this (this is the default setting on a Windows 2008 R2 server). Here is the KB article for it from Microsoft.

I had two options
1. Configure my server so that there was no explicit requirement for the 128bit encryption
2. Change my client computer to have a minimum of at least 128bit encrypted session

I chose to do 2. since I did not want to lower my session encryption.

To do this, on my local computer I did the following.
1. Opened up the Local Group Policy Editor
2. Browsed to
Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) servers

and changed both above from No minimum to Require 128-bit encryption

If you want to lower the server security settings, on the Lync Server, open up the Local Security Policy Editor (or your GPO Editor and then Default Domain Policy), then go to

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) servers

and make sure the above are set to No Minimum (you will have to untick the 128-bit requirement)

This saved me a days anguish and hope others find this helpful.

(Special thanks to Rohit Gulati's Blog )

Steve Jobs: The Thomas Edison of the 21st Century

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:40:00 +0000

You all might have heard by now that Steve Jobs passed away today. It surely is a sad day, the day when the world lost one of its most influential and inventive beings. Steve was a visionary, pioneer and above all, a tremendous leader. His legacy lives on, enriching billions in their daily lives. Hats off to you Steve.

I managed to find a speech that Steve gave to Stanford students. It is really moving and breathtaking. I urge you all to share in the dream that this great man dreamed.

Steve Job's 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

The Certificate is Invalid for Exchange Server Usage

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:24:00 +0000

Recently I came across a problem while installing a new certificate on my Exchange 2010 server. Once I had installed the certificate via EMC (Exchange Management Console), I found out that I could not assign any services to it. In the status column for the certificate, there was an error displayed "The Certificate is Invalid For Exchange Server Usage".

I checked the certificate details to ensure everything was correct and superficially, everything looked fine. I checked the thread of trust, and it was correct as well. I then did some searching on the web and found this excellent article on the issue http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2010-certificate-invalid-for-exchange-server-usage-error .

Unfortunately, my issue was not as easily solved as listed in the article above. So I decided to tackle the problem from its foundation.

1. I opened up the Certificate mmc.
2. Here I found the issue! For some unknown reason, my certificate's Intermediate CA and Root CA certificate were in the incorrect certificate store (they were in the Personal certificate store!).
3. I exported the Root CA and Intermediate CA certificates and then deleted them from the Personal Certificate Store.
4. I imported the Root CA into the Trusted Root Certificate Authority and the Intermediate CA certificate into the Intermediate Certificate Authorities certificate Store.

I then refreshed the EMC and viola, the message beside the Certificate now read The Certificate is valid for Exchange Server usage :)

Internet Explorer - Disable Addon

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:14:00 +0000

Addons extend the functionality of Internet browsers. This can be a good thing, but at times, they themselves can be the cause of problems.

Whenever troubleshooting issues with web based clients, once I have re-created the problem, I disable addons and check, to ensure the issue is not caused by them.

A simple way to do this with Internet Explorer is to start it from the run box with a switch that tells it to do exactly that.

Go to the Run box (Start\Run or if in Vista and above, click on the Windows Circle and then type in the search box at the bottom) and then type
iexplore.exe -extoff

This will start Internet Explorer with all addons disabled. If this rectifies the issue, then most likely your problem lies with one of the addons. Try enabling one at a time and see if the problem reappears. If it does, then the last addon that you enabled is the culprit. In which case, disable it and see if the problem gets resolved.

Happy troubleshooting :)

iPhone Browser

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:31:00 +0000

iPhone and iTunes seem to be a match made in heaven (well actually made at Apple HQ). If you want to load anything on your precious iPhone that cannot be bought from the Apple App Store, you most often have to use iTunes.

Now many times you will find that iTunes does not give you the same accessibility as a normal file browser does. For instance, if you have a flash disk, plug it into your computer. You can then use Windows Explorer to see all the files on it. If you want to do the same with your iPhone, you can not see any more than the photos on it.

Hold on. I might just have the app for that :) Well actually it is an application called iPhone Browser . You do have to install iTunes to use it though. Once installed, you can access pretty much all files on it (according to the support documents, some directories can only be browsed on a jailbroken iPhone).

Give this a try if you want to use something other than the clunky iTunes Apple recommends.

The System Administrator has set policies to prevent this installation

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:37:00 +0000

I came across the above error when trying to install some core components on a Windows 2008 R2 Server. First thoughts were that this was due to some UAC setting. Searched google, found some articles but they pointed to some incomplete installs that might still be lingering. I needed to do some registry edits to get past this issue. 30 minutes on, I was still facing the same issue.

Finally, following my nose, I started a cmd.exe using the Run as Administrator option. Then I used the command line to navigate to where the file I wanted to run was. I then executed it. Hey presto! It installed properly :)

Moral of the story. Windows 2008 Server is locked down like Fort Knox. Administrator accounts are stripped off their privleges when they log onto it and you have to explicitly run software as an administrator (or try a sneaky way as I did) to do simple tasks.

Oh well. What can we do... we did ask for better security from Microsoft didnt we?

Duplicate contacts in Blackberry smartphone Using Blackberry Enterprise/Professional

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:54:00 +0000

For those of you supporting Blackberry Enterprise/Professional Servers, chances are you might come across a device that has duplicate contacts. These can be a pain to resolve especially if the only way you know to resolve it is to wipe the device and re-activate it. Or worse yet, manually delete the duplicates, only for them to come back when the device gets synch'd.

Note, I am assuming that your email account does NOT have duplicate contacts. If this is the case, then you will have to export all your contacts to PST (with the option of not exporting duplicates). Then delete your contacts from your Outlook and re-import from the PST just created.

If the duplicate contacts are only in your blackberry, then do the following.

1. Go into Contacts and then press the menu to get into Options
2. type rset (you will not see it being typed since there is no place to type it. Ensure you have got multitap enabled and not suretype as this makes it easier to know what is being typed)
3. You will get a prompt asking you to confirm that you want to wipe the contacts and repopulate from the Blackberry server. Confirm this.
4. All your contacts will be deleted (time to panic ... not :) )
5. Contacts will then slowly start downloading off the Blackberry server and will appear back in your device's contact list.

The above has been taken from http://bluescreensolutions.blogspot.com/2009/12/duplicate-contacts-on-blackberry-using.html

Hope this helps those in need.

The 'Microsoft Information Store' returned 'Backup is already active.

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:17:00 +0000

While backing up Exchange Stores on a Microsoft Exchange 2003 server for a friend using the ol' faithful Windows NTBackup, I came across the following error.

Backup Status
Operation: Backup
Active backup destination: File
Media name: "exchange_backup.bkf created 18/07/2011 at 10:33 PM"

Volume shadow copy creation: Attempt 1.
Backup of "ExchSrvr01\Microsoft Information Store\First Storage Group"
Backup set #1 on media #1
Backup description: "Set created 18/07/2011 at 10:33 PM"
Media name: "exchange_backup.bkf created 18/07/2011 at 10:33 PM"

Backup Type: Normal

Backup started on 18/07/2011 at 10:33 PM.
The 'Microsoft Information Store' returned 'Backup is already active.

' from a call to 'HrESEBackupSetup()' additional data '-'The 'Microsoft Information Store' returned 'Functions called in an invalid sequence.

' from a call to 'HrESEBackupClose()' additional data '-'
The operation was ended.
Backup completed on 18/07/2011 at 10:33 PM.
Directories: 0
Files: 0
Bytes: 0
Time: 1 second

----------------------

The operation did not successfully complete.

----------------------

Failing to remember any solutions off hand, I consulted the Oracle, (Google is the almighty I am talking about). In return for my search, I got hundreds of matches. I opened the first one, as it was from Microsoft Support http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820272. This said that I had my Exchange Server Databases installed on the same drive as my operating system. Due to this the backup was failing. This did not fit my situation so I trawled further.

Persistence and bullheadedness is the recipe to success and Viola! I found my answer. To be quite honest, when I read it, I thought it to be too simple to work. I said to myself, if this works, I will be a monkey's uncle. And as it stands, a happy monkey has just inherited me as their uncle :)

The problem was due to the simple fact that circular logging was enabled on the Storage Group. I disabled it, restarted the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service and tried NTBackup again. To my hearts joy, it worked :) (exact article can be found here http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1182209&page=1

Have a great week.

Are you migrating to Exchange 2010? Need Help removing Exchange 2003?

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:53:00 +0000

Hi All.

I know it has been a while since my last post. All I can say is that things have been very hectic and I have not had time to put up any new things. I do tweet or re-twitter from time to time, so for those that would like to hear more from me, you can follow me at twitter.com/nivleshc

For the past few weeks I have been removing our Legacy Email Servers (there you go. Now you know that we have moved off Exchange 2003 :) ). Uninstalling Exchange 2003 can be a breeze if things work well but for those moments when things just grind to a standstill, everything seems to break around you and you feel like the sky is falling, you need to know where your nearest life line is. You could call me :) or you could use the following links to make the uninstall a much smoother ride.

Here you go, some useful links

1. I found this to be a very good place to start. It covers both automatically uninstalling and manual uninstalls.
KB833396: How to Remove Exchange 2003 from your Computer
2. Another link, but this time from MSExchange.org.
Remove Exchange Server from Entire Exchange Organization

If you still find yourself in deep water, send me an email and I will try to help you out.

Have a great and trouble free weekend.

One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 03:28:00 +0000

While uninstalling one of my Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers, I came across this very odd error due to which the uninstall would not proceed "One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server""

Lucky for Google, I found a blog post which helped me rectify this issue.

The error occurs for multiple reasons, as listed below:

1. There is a user account for which the mailbox was never created because it was not activated ie. user never logged in or no mail was sent to it.

2. There is a user who has Exchange attributes but no mailbox referencing this server.

Resolution:

1. Start Active Directory Users and Computers and right click to get Find

2. Click Custom Search in the drop down selection box

3. Click the Advanced tab

4. In LDAP field type:

(msExchHomeServerName=/O=myexchangeorgname/
OU=myorgname/CN=Configuration/CN=Servers/CN=myexchangeserver)
(objectClass=User)

myexchangeorgname,myorgname,myexchangeserver can all be obtained by using ADSIEdit and opening a user account and looking for the value of msExchHomeServerName

[the above was obtained from http://msexchangetips.blogspot.com/2008/04/exchange-one-or-more-users-currently.html ]

Hope this helps.

Android on a PC?

noreply@blogger.com (Nivlesh Chandra) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:59:00 +0000

is taking over the world, inch by inch. Released in 2007, almost 10 months after Apple's release of its first generation iPhone, Android has steadily increased its presence, first in the mobile sector and now in tablet pcs. Android, a Google product, though suffering from fragmentation, is still an OS to reckon with. With updates coming almost every few months, it has kept abreast with the markets needs. Apple has got a very capable competitor and in years to come, who knows, it might be the leading operating system in both the mobile and tablet space.

As with many good things in life, you do not have to rush out and get them in order to test drive them. For those that own an HTC Vogue (Okta Touch), you can refer to my previous post How to Install Android 2.1 [Eclair] on HTC Vogue [Telecom NZ Okta Touch to install Android on this Windows Mobile phone.

For those wanting to try out Android on your PC, worry not. I found two projects that will let you do just that.

BlueStacks - this software allows you to run Android Apps on your pc. It does this by installing a virtual layer on your Windows pc, in which it runs Android. I tried downloading this software to try it out but at present the website is not taking any new registrations. I will keep you all posted on how it goes with this software when I manage to download a copy.

Android-X86 - a very impressive project that allows you to run Android on netbooks and most notebooks. At present there are a few models that you can install it on but the list seems to be growing every few weeks. Also, you can install it as a virtual machine using VMware. Once running, it looks really impressive.

Give these a try and post your reviews. It would be nice to compare our mileage.