SBS licensing Reset

admin — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:31:16 +0000

A runaway process on SBS2003 decided to fill up all the disk space on C: in the early hours of the morning. The fallout from this was the System log was corrupt and the SBS license data was reset to the default 5 CALs.
The System log was easy to fix – reboot the server.
The SBS license data was an absolute pain. I’d never run the “Back up licenses” utility in the Licensing section of Server Management. Microsoft have KB article 888818 discussing this, which is either re-enter the licenses, restore the C:\WINDOWS folder or restore a backup of the licenses.
The first wasn’t an option as I was offsite and the person with the key to the safe wasn’t in. The second was just not viable – why Microsoft couldn’t specify which file/folder needed restoring I don’t know. The third would have been OK if ever I had run it.
After much stuffing about I found that the SBS2003 licenses are kept in the licstr.cpa file in the WINDOWS\system32 folder. Thankfully, Microsoft actually keep an automatic backup of this in autolicstr.cpa. The simple process was to stop the License Logging Service, rename licstr.cpa to licstr.cpa.old, then copy autolicstr.cpa to licstr.cpa. After this I started License Logging Service and used Server Management to confirm that the licenses had been restored.

Sonicwall – Configure for secure WIFI. Seperate X2 from X0

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:58:24 +0000

As I understand you want to configure x2 as wlan subnet 10.0.0.x and you do not want to allow x2 subnet to communicate with x0 subnet.

Please configure firewall access rule from wlan>lan
Click on Add tab:
From General tab>Select Action as deny>From Zone :WLan>To Zone:Lan.
Service:Any
Source:x2 subnet
Destination:x0 subnet

And may I know what is the x0 subnet on the sonicwall.
If you are not able to browse to internet on x2 subnet we need do a packet capture and determine this.
Make sure that you have this outbound nat policy.
Original Source:Any
Translated source:Wan primary ip
Original Destination:Any
Translated Destination:Original
Original Service:Any
Translated Service:original
Interface inbound:x2
Interface Outbound:x1

Group Policy to Publish MSI

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:57:13 +0000

Create a Group Policy Object
To create a Group Policy object (GPO) to use to distribute the software package:
Start the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. To do this, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
In the console tree, right-click your domain, and then click Properties.
Click the Group Policy tab, and then click New.
Type a name for this new policy (for example, Office XP distribution), and then press ENTER.
Click Properties, and then click the Security tab.
Click to clear the Apply Group Policy check box for the security groups that you want to prevent from having this policy applied.
Click to select the Apply Group Policy check box for the groups that you want this policy to apply to.
When you are finished, click OK.
Back to the top
Assign a Package
To assign a program to computers that are running Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, or Microsoft Windows XP Professional, or to users who are logging on to one of these workstations:
Start the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. To do this, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
In the console tree, right-click your domain, and then click Properties.
Click the Group Policy tab, select the group policy object that you want, and then click Edit.
Under Computer Configuration, expand Software Settings.
Right-click Software installation, point to New, and then click Package.
In the Open dialog box, type the full Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path of the shared installer package that you want. For example, \\file server\share\file name.msi.

Important Do not use the Browse button to access the location. Make sure that you use the UNC path to the shared installer package.
Click Open.
Click Assigned, and then click OK. The package is listed in the right pane of the Group Policy window.
Close the Group Policy snap-in, click OK, and then quit the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in.
When the client computer starts, the managed software package is automatically installed.

Copy a short cut to a users desktop with a login script

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:56:38 +0000

Copy \\ServerName\SharedFolder\Shortcut.lnk “%userprofile%\Desktop” /Y

Jump lists and Recent Opened in WIndows 7

admin — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:19:12 +0000

At times Word, Excel, Adobe, etc might stop showing their “jump list” when you press the start bar. Try the below fix, but note that it will clear the existing shortcuts from the list.

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
and delete any suspiciously large files. For example, I deleted a 175kB file, and now Firefox lists recently opened web pages in its jump list.

SBS 2011 Exchange 2010 SP1 – Outlook Web Access HTTP 500 Error

admin — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:16:06 +0000

Microsoft Exchange Forms-Based Authentication service: Not Running.

BES Troubleshooting – Missing MAGT Log??

admin — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:45:11 +0000

So when of my BES servers lastnight seemed to get struck by lightning and go offline. The users turned the server back on this morning when they entered the office. However, Blackberrys didnt work!!? No mail was sent or received on the devices. The strange thing was my trusty MAGT log was missing. How am I supposed to troubleshoot without it?

Long story short after digging through just about every log I could find I didnt find any smoking guns. I did however find lots of errors similar to this one:

MAPI call failed. Error ‘Network problems are preventing connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server computer.’, LowLevelError 1717, Component ‘Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store’, Context 1300

And these:

( BlackBerry Controller ) LogReceiver: Failed to bind a socket.

SRPClient::Connect: Error calling host “localhost” [127.0.0.1] (10061)

After pulling my hair out I realized that these last 2 were actually my problem. The controller service couldnt keep itself awake. It couldnt bind a socket?

Through trial an error, and google-fu I was able to fix the problem by stopping the DNS Server service (odd?) and then starting the Blackberry Controller Service, and then restarting the DNS service.

The controller service stayed online, mail started flowing, and my MAGT came back!!

Google Apps Migration – GAM for groups

admin — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:38:33 +0000

Google unfortunately doesnt allow you to create groups for secondary domains.

However using GAM you can work around this with the following commain

gam create group groupemail@secondarydomain.com name “groups name” description “groups description” permission anyone

BES Installations and SQL Instances

admin — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:51:59 +0000

BES and SQL can be annoying to setup the first time if the settings are not correct.

Make sure of the following:

1) Make sure the account your doing the installation with (lets say BLACKBERRYADMIN) has the dbcreator permission in SQL and any others that might be needed.

2) Make sure that named pipes and TCPIP are enabled in the SQL server configuration manager

If not sure, logon to the server with the administrator credentials, logon to SQL and create the BES service account (BLACKBERRYADMIN) and assign the proper permissions

Google Apps migration – Multi Domain awesomeness using GAM

admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 08:01:14 +0000

Team,

Google Apps used to be somewhat painful when it came to multiple domains registered under the same account. Now that GAM is around (http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/) this process is now much easier.

Simply download and extract GAM to a directory. Enable the Provisioning API. Run GAM.

GAM runs from the command line. Once you load it up the first time you need to authenticate using the API. Quite simply you type in: “gam info domain”

You then enter the domain, the user alias, and password.

In this particular scenario I have a company with two separate SMTP domains. Primary.com and Secondary.com. Their current Exchange servers is responsible for both. I have all of the Primary.com users migrate over, but now what for their secondary users?

The answer is to create the users in your google control panel with a primary.com smtp address. Once you then use the GAMME tool to migrate the users, you would use the following string:

first.last@secondary.com, first.last@primary.com

This will migrate the users account that belongs to the secondary.com account on the exchange server into their temporary primary.com account in gmail.

Once that process has been completed with head into GAM and type the following command:

gam multi move first.last@primary.com first.last@secondary.com

This will now take the user account and change the domain to secondary.com, effectively having worked around a silly problem with multiple domains in the same account. As a bonus it will keep the first.last@primary.com alias in their user account!

Shout outs to Jay Lee for his assistance with this problem.

http://blog.jhltechservices.com/