It tastes like burning » Work

Blackberry issues for a client

Chad — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:14:34 +0000

A client of mine, whose has about 5 Blackberry users contacted me early yesterday morning in a panic. They were reporting that no one was receiving emails on their blackberrys anymore, and that it’s been happening since last Friday. Here’s the back story, on Thursday of last week I promoted one of their servers to a domain controller as we’re getting ready to decommission an older server. So the client was quick to blame my changes for the blackberrys stopping to work. Now this client does not run a blackberry enterprise server, and I really had no idea how they communicating with the Exchange server. I’ve heard they connected through Outlook Web access, and OWA was working fine.

I spent the majority of Monday digging through server log files searching for anything that could be causing the issue. We rebooted every server and their Cisco, and the Blackberrys still were not getting email. My onsite contact was freaking out because the blackberry users are all upper management and she was under a lot of pressure to get them working again as all the users were traveling and were relying on the phone for email. At some point in the afternoon, she asked if I could revert the changes I made to the one server. I told her that I didn’t believe the issue was caused from my change and I didn’t think it would be wise to demote the server back to a member server. As the day ended, we got new reports from the users that their email was working until sometime Saturday morning. Now I was more confident it wasn’t because of my changes. I told her I would come onsite the next day and work with one of the blackberrys and blackberry support and get it figured out.

So today I drive an hour to their office and with blackberry in hand begin looking in to how they are setup. Find that the email setup happens through a blackberry website that is particular to their provider. While in this setup, there is an ‘Advanced Settings’ area, and that is where I found the issue. I find a form that has their OWA URL, except that it was wrong. The URL that was listed was almost right, but was simply missing an s, as in https://. Once I added the s and saved it out, they phones started syncing again. I have their OWA requiring and SSL connection and it has been that way for a long time, which makes me ask, what happened? Did the URL in the setup change for 5 users on 3 different providers? Or was that address always missing the s, but it was smart enough to redirect to the https page and that broke on Saturday? Regardless of what it was, it wasn’t my fault or related to promoting a server on their network.

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Windows Server DNS question

Chad — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:06:43 +0000

Using the internal DNS server(Windows 2003 Server), can I point a single URL from a legitimate domain to a certain IP address, while leaving all other variances of that domain pointing to their existing location?

Here’s an example of what I’m looking for.

http://www.notourdomain.com/ needs to route over the internet
http://inside.notourdomain.com/ needs to be routed over an internal VPN connection

Can it be done?

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Angry IP Scanner is a threat??

Chad — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:55:38 +0000

I have been using Angry IP Scanner for a long time and probably use it at least once a week. It’s an awesome, easy to use freeware utility. But as of today, Symantec thinks it is a threat to my system, and has quarantined all instances of ipscan.exe. I need to investigate if this is true, or if this is just a false positive.

From the Symantec listing:

Hacktool.Angry is a tool for scanning ranges of IP addresses to find computers. It is also a port scanner that can be used to probe ports on computers.

Update 1: Found some chatter on the official Angry IP forums at SourceForge. But no official word from the software company or Symantec.

Update 2: Andy has posted a link in the comments to a Symantec page for reporting false positives. So if your here because you’re experiencing this issue, please fill out the form and let’s hope Symantec does the right thing.

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Will people ever learn?

Looking for system imaging software, with a catch

Chad — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:23:03 +0000

I’m wondering if there is software out there for creating an image file of a Windows computer, without having to install software first. I have a computer that I want to make a complete backup of, I have Ghost, and I know that will do it, but I have to install Ghost first, which I don’t want to do. Any suggestions?

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Super Bowl Site Hacked with Trojan Horse

Chad — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 16:35:22 +0000

Super Bowl Site Hacked with Trojan Horse

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Vista Business Upgrade?? That can’t be right!

Chad — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:12:00 +0000

We just received our January Action Pack shipment and as I went through the contents, I found the Vista dvd, but it’s listed as Microsoft Windows Vista Upgrade Business. Huh? An upgrade? That doesn’t seem right, plus I thought I read that Vista upgrade disks will not do full installs(I haven’t confirmed this though). Well, I’m off to scour the net looking for more info on this.

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You Had Me At EHLO… : RTM Exchange Server 2007 Setup GUI Walkthrough

Chad — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:26:20 +0000

Screenshot walkthrough of a Exchange 2007 installation.

You Had Me At EHLO… : RTM Exchange Server 2007 Setup GUI Walkthrough

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Do I have Downgrade Rights for my software that comes in Action Pack?

Chad — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 20:38:26 +0000

Interesting….

Microsoft Small Business Community Blog : Do I have Downgrade Rights for my software that comes in Action Pack?

This is a question that has been floating around a few of the online groups lately, so I thought I would post the answer here for you. This comes from the Microsoft Action Pack Team:

â€œWhile MAPS does not include downgrade rights, a partner can continue to use a previous version of a product through the remainder of their subscription year.

The intention of the Action Pack program is to provide the latest software technology to the partners, thus once a product is revised the previous version will no longer available.”

So for all of you that received the Windows XP Professional licenses in your Action Pack, you still have the rights to use them throughout the term of your annual subscription. Remember that Action Pack is a subscription and you will need to renew that subscription annually. When your annual subscription ends, you no longer have the rights to run the software that you received in the expired kit. To continue to receive the software benefits included in Action Pack, you will need to renew your subscription for another year. When you do renew your subscription, you will be renewing for the current software that is included in the Action Pack (which no longer includes the previous Windows Desktop Operating Systems). At that point, you will no longer have licensing rights to Windows XP through your Action Pack subscription.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman
Microsoft US Senior Manager
Small Business Community Engagement
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights

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edwalt’s: If I cannot remote, there is no hope…. right?

Chad — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:50:42 +0000

edwalt’s – Things I Wish I’d known about Small Business Server…… : If I cannot remote, there is no hope…. right?

Here’s the scenario; I am the Network Administrator and for whatever reason the remote desktop option has been disabled on the XP client I am trying to reach. It worked fine a couple of days ago, however I cannot connect to the client now. Is it possible to connect to a client machine remotely – even if the remote desktop option is disabled on the XP client?

The answer to this is yes…. as long as you have the rights to do so.

So how do you do it.

Open Regedit on the server.

Select File – Connect Network registry

Enter the name of the client machine and select “Check Name”

At the bottom of your servers registry tree you will know see 2 hives appear.

The Hkey_Local_Machine and the Hkey_Users under the clients computer name.

Goto hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server\FdenyTSConnection=1

Change the FdenyTSConnection to 0

Attempt to logon on again

[via: In The Trenches]

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Victim of a drive-by soaking

Chad — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:29:39 +0000

I was in ~~beautiful~~ miserable, rainy dowtown Chicago today, and the weather was anything but pleasant. It wasn’t raining this morning when I got on the train so I never thought about bringing an umbrella. When I arrived downtown it was a different story. I thought ‘Oh Well, so I get a little wet walking to my client’. It’s really not a far walk, but within a few blocks I was fairly drenched. I walked past a little newstand so I popped in to see if they had umbrellas. I was in luck, not only did they have them but they wern’t nearly as expensive as I thought they would be. I handed the nice cashier some money and started heading for the door. I try to open the umbrella after I get outside and the frigg’n button doesn’t do anything, It’s Broke! With a little persusian I broke the button, but was at least able to open the umbrella manually. I made it to the client with only being mildy drenched, but that’s not really the point of this post.

Later in the day, I had some downtime so I decided to walk somewhere to get some lunch. So here I am walking up Lasalle St with my umbrella, staying dry, when a f’ing cab going by was hugging the the curb and (I’m sure purposely) hit a pothole filled with water. And just like the movies, I got hit in the side by a wave of water. I was soaked on my right side from the armpit on down. I just couldn’t believe that happened. Fortunately it was well after the normal lunch time so I was able to easily get in somewhere and hang out long enough for my clothes to dry out a bit. On my walk back, I made sure to stay as far away from the curb as possible.

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