Archive for category Brain Busters

Installing Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal, The PCs That Kevin Built on August 18, 2009

exchange error

Well RTM (Release To Manufacturing) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are here and boy have I been a excited and busy little beaver the past week! Thus far I have only put Windows 7 RTM on to my work laptop as I’ve been pretty flat out, but it fixed a few bugs had…the smallest but most gratifying was that it now saves username and password for VPN connections properly.

So I ran into a few hiccups when installing Exchange 2007 SP1 onto Server 2008 R2 RTM, but nothing that wasn’t too hard to overcome. So I thought I would share the knowledge with anyone out there banging their head against a brick wall too.

Firstly, make sure you have IIS installed…I installed all components of the IIS package as I plan to use this server for other web related tasks, that covered all the Exchange crucial components. Check http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691354.aspx for all the system requirements and command lines to install them (you can add them as roles via the GUI also though).

So once that was done, you will have to run the exchange installation in compatibility mode for Windows Vista SP2. This will get you past a stop error…but you will eventually get to the screenshot above:

Error: An error occurred. The error code was 3221684346. The message was The data area passed to a system call is too small…

It was a very vague area, but the whole installation succeeds except for installing the mailbox role. The way I eventually got around this was to then close the setup (as it has successfully installed everything but the mailbox role, it does not fail entirely). I then installed Microsoft Update and applied the Update Rollup 9 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB970162). After a reboot, I ran the setup from the CD again, this time with both Vista SP2 compatibility and “Run as Administrator” enabled. This will launch the change / uninstall version of the setup, from here just tick the “Mailbox Role” to re-install that roll. Then, Robert’s ya mother’s brother.

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Unlocking iPhone Tethering

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal on July 19, 2009

I was stupidly excited about the release of the iPhone 3.0 firmware, for the primary reason that you would be able to use the iPhone for internet tethering. In layman’s terms, you can use your iPhone as a modem to the 3G phone network. This is the number 1 feature i missed from my Nokia phones.

However, when the firmware came out and I tried to enable tethering I was bitterly disappointed to find the message “Please contact your network provider to enable tethering”. But after a bit of Googling I ended up back at Whirlpool forums where some users have made scripts which you can run on your iPhone to unlock the tethering. Here is the thread I used to get tethering working for Optus:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1219715.html

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Creating Custom iPhone Ringtones – No Jail Break Required

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal on July 19, 2009

I spent quite some time looking on the Internet for a tutorial on how to put a custom ringtone on my iPhone. But every tutorial I found always needed you to Jail Break your iPhone. I’m not a fan of Jail Breaking your iPhone, for the sole reason that I don’t want to risk my warranty using customised firmware. It just isn’t worth the risk in my eyes.

So I set out to find a way that I could put custom ringtones on the iPhone in an at least semi-legitimate way. After all, it couldn’t be that hard right? The iPhone is a portable music player after all. After a little bit of research and fiddling around with iTunes and the iPhone I worked it out, as suspected it’s not too hard to make it work.

After downloading some pre-made ringtones from websites, I noticed that they are all .MFR. iTunes native format is .M4A, so I decided to see if it was as simple as renaming a .M4A file to .M4R to create a ringtone from it…it was. So all you need to do is take a file you want, convert it to AAC format, rename to .M4R and sync it to your iPhone. Follow the step by step instructions and screenshots below to setup custom ringtones on your iPhone.

Steps:

  1. Open File in iTunes
  2. Convert to AAC
  3. Open in Windows Explorer
  4. Rename to M4R
  5. Add M4R to Library
  6. Check file is in Ringtones
  7. Ensure Sync Ringtones is Selected and Sync
  8. Select Ringtone on iPhone
View Creating Custom iPhone Ringtones - No Jail Break Required

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Windows Live Writer LIBXML2 Problem Solved

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal on June 22, 2009

So, Brandon from the Windows Live Writer team got back to me super quick, thanks Brandon! He let me know that the problem I am encountering is actually because of the LIBXML2 XML parsing library stripping the opening “<” off code it parses. You can fix it by upgrading LIBXML2 on your server or install a plugin:

You can upgrade your libxml2 (on your server if you have control) as well WordPress, or you can install this plugin by one of the WordPress team members.
http://josephscott.org/code/wordpress/plugin-libxml2-fix/
Then you should be back in business!

And sure enough, the plugin works a treat! Thanks Brandon (and Joseph for making it!)!

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Windows 7 Teething Issues

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Journal, The PCs That Kevin Built, Work on June 21, 2009

Well now I have really jumped in the deep end with Windows 7, I’m starting to run into some stumbling blocks. Nothing major, but some teething issues none-the-less. So far I only have 2 issues that are bothering me enough to remember:

(Something to note it is that I am now using 7137 x64 or x86 on all of the PCs)

  1. VPN Connections not saving passwords: When I create a VPN connection to dial in to work, it will never remember the user name or password, even when the box is checked to remember it. I just can’t work it out and it is definitely a bug which I have reported with feedback. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass having to put it in every time (randomly generated password), but it’s doable. It remembers all the other settings, including security parameters though, so not all lost.
  2. Issues accessing domain resources on Windows 2003 Domains: I haven’t looked at this issue too much yet, but now that my work laptop is setup with Windows 7 it is becoming a more prevalent issue. Both at work and home, the domains are setup with roaming profiles and redirected folders (my documents). There seems to be an issue with Windows 7 accessing these resources in a timely manner, there is quite a delay and I am not sure what the issue is, with the Windows XP PCs it works just fine. With my home network, the problem even crashes my server; with lots of traffic from bit torrents etc. I’m suspecting some kind of DNS related problem at the moment, but still investigating.

If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!

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Puzzling Publishing Problems – Windows Live Writer

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters on June 21, 2009

I have been having the most bizarre problem with Windows Live Writer and WordPress recently that has stopped me from blogging at all. It seems I WLW has pampered me too much with all its bells and whistles which made blogging so easy, now that I am without it, it is more like a chore. It’s basically screwing up the formatting in posts ever since a few weeks back when an update was applied to WLW I believe, it does this:

I publish:

Title: test’s
Content: This is an example post with problem’s i am having with WLW.

It spits out:

Title: testrsquo;s
Content: pThis is an example post with problem’s i am having with WLW./p

Here is a link to the sample post: http://www.pixsoul.com.au/?p=287

I have tried re-installing WLW, WP, older versions of WP, different version OS’s with WLW, different blogs, themes etc…it seems to me to boil down to WLW. I’ve shot them off an email and hopefully they can remedy the problem shortly, or tell me if I am being a nOOb! I’ll post up progress when I receive it though.

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Exchange Certified & Jumping In The Deep End of the Win 7 Pool

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, I.T. Certification, Journal on June 8, 2009

Windows 7 Mania

Well it has been a while in between posts as I have been trying to work out why the hell posts using Windows Live Writer are now putting in weird formatting. Starting to think it’s something going on with the site rather than Windows 7 now as have tested on numourous Win 7 PCs (could be a Live Writer specific problem also though). Going to hang out until WordPress 2.8 is released this week and do a fresh install of the website and see if that knocks it on the head.

Well I successfully passed my 70-284 exam last week, Implementing and Managing Exchange Server 2003. From memory I got 843/1000, so happy with the result, even if it did take me 2 goes. But it has sparked a new motivation to get my next certification as I released that I only need 1 more (70-291) and I will be a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA). So getting back on the books in a big way as I am very keen to acquire that title on my way to MCSE and other certifications in the later half of the year.

This week I jumped in the deep end of the Windows 7 pool and installed it on both my netbook and my work laptop. I did it via USB and it was super simple (I’ll post a how to this week sometime, I promise!). I’m having some issues on my work laptop connecting to the Windows 2003 domain at work, the same symptom I had at home with slow folder redirection for My Docs etc to a Windows 2003 server. At home I ended up just turning folder redirection off for the moment, but definitely need to get on top of it at work soon as it won’t be too long until we are getting new PC’s shipping with Windows 7. I’m looking forward to the potential problems ahead though so that after using it so much on a variety of systems I will really get a handle on it for successful implementation at work.

Daemon Tools have released a Win 7 compatible version of their program also which I am wrapped about as PowerISO which I have been using slowly decides that one virtual drive will never work again; you create another which works; same thing happens eventually and so on!

Anyway, back to basking in the glory of 3 Windows 7 PC’s and behaving like a Octupus multitasking on all of them!

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The PC's That Kevin (finally) Built

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, Projects, The PCs That Kevin Built on May 25, 2009

View The Destroyer (Gamer) & Mordor (Server)

 

Well it has been a bit over a month since I upgraded my little beasts and I have been slack and not uploaded any of the photos I took. So here they are, a little story board through the stages of building and customising the new computers.

Some highlights:

  • Silverstone TJ07 with customer painted satin black interior
  • Custom mounted HDD on case panel of an Antec Minuet 180
  • Thermalright CPU & GPU Cooling with Zalman fan controller and Coolermaster fans

 

I was planning on putting my Intel Q6600 in to my server, but it just would not play nice with the GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, so I ended up sticking with my Intel e7300 and just installing Server 2003 with Exchange on to it. The plan was to run a VM server but the e7300 doesn’t have the VT (Virtualisation Technology) on board support to run VM’s. I plan on getting an Intel Q9400 and maybe 8GB of ram for it in a month or two, at which time I plan to put on Citrix XenServer, which is another free alternative in the VM server market and looks superior to VMWare ESXi and Microsoft Hyper V Server 2008.

Anyway, enjoy the happy snaps!

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Microsoft Exchange 2003 SMTP Relay to Smart Hosts

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, I.T. Certification, Projects, The PCs That Kevin Built on May 6, 2009

Sitting behind a dynamic IP means that your going to get blocked by a lot of SMTP servers if you send directly from that IP address. Most ISPs allow their SMTP servers to be used as relay Smart Hosts; so when you send an email out to the internet it will relay to your ISPs SMTP server and then send from there…from that IP address.

Its a pretty simple thing to set up in Exchange System Manager:

  1. In Connectors, right-click on Internet Mail SMTP Connector and choose Properties.
  2. Change the radio buttons to: Forward all mail through this connector to the following smart hosts
  3. Enter your ISPs SMTP server in here, if you have the IP be sure to enter it within square brackets, below is the address for iiNet in Australia.

exchange_smarthost2

  1. All SMTP servers these days require authentication to send outbound through them, so select the Advanced tab.
  2. Then click Outbound Security
  3. Choose Basic authentication
  4. Click Modify
  5. Enter your ISP user name and password and click OKexchange_smarthost

The Exchange server is now setup to relay outbound mail through your ISP, so that should see all your mail successfully arrive at it’s destination 100% of the time. But be sure to test it out and check that your ISP allows the use of a Smart Host.

For inbound email I have also now added a 2nd MX record for my domains which points to my web server (which is how I used to have email set up), which means I will have another layer of redundancy for inbound emails, should I lose my ISP connection for the server or it crashes etc.

Now time to kick back and wait for the emails to flood in, though not SPAM anymore!

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Microsoft Exchange 2003 Spam Protection

Posted by Ken Thompson in Brain Busters, I.T. Certification, Projects, The PCs That Kevin Built on May 6, 2009

So now that I have Exchange all hooked up and chugging away, I still had a few issues to sort out before I could (In Demtel’s Words) “Set it and Forget It!”. Namely, now that my domain’s MX records pointed straight to my server, there was no SPAM protection (when hosted on my web server, I had SPAM Assassin). On another SPAM related issue, because I am behind a dynamic IP, a lot of SPAM black lists block these ranges so I was getting a few bounce backs as a result of that… so I need to enable the exact same filtering that is blocking my outgoing emails currently!

So firstly, I setup my Exchange server to cross reference emails against a publicly available SPAM black list, SpamHaus. You do this via adding a connection filtering rule in message delivery properties (in the Exchange System Manager snap-in):

  1. Under Global Settings, right-click Message Delivery and select Properties
  2. Select the Connection Filtering tab
  3. Click Add
  4. Enter zen.spamhaus.org as the DNS Suffix of Provider and Display Name
  5. Clock Ok

exchange_spam

Next you have to manually enable filtering with this rule on your SMTP Virtual Server. To do this:

  1. Under Servers > *Server Name* > Protocols > SMTP, right-click your SMTP server and select Properties
  2. Click Advanced next to IP Address
  3. Click Edit
  4. Tick all the Check Boxes in this window and choose OK

exchange_spam2

 

So now that has blocked dynamic IP ranges and publicly known SPAM servers / address ranges for sending you email, too easy! As I don’t have that many address on my domains, this and some basic SCL filtering is thus far proving to be very effective at blocking SPAM. Obviously on an enterprise level you will need some 3rd party SPAM / Virus software on top of this basic SPAM protection available in Exchange.

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