Tuesday 3 August 2010

RDP Connections via TS Gateway under Windows 7 realllllly slow - ESET NOD32 is the culprit!

This has annoyed me for a long time but I didn't realise the problem was limited to connections from Windows 7 machines running NOD32 anti virus - RDP sessions through TS gateway have a horrible lag.  I honestly thought it was just slowness on the server side.  However, it turns out to be a problem with NOD, which is only apprent under Windows 7, same NOD version running on Windows XP does not experience the problem.  To overcome it:

I have had a look at the ESET configuration and you don't need to fully disable the web filtering.

Under the "HTTP, HTTPS" section you just need the "Do not use HTTPS protocol checking".  This is normally greyed out because the SSL section is set to "Do not scan SSL protocol" by default so you just need to temporarly change this to "Always scan SSL protocol" while you make the change to the "HTTP, HTTPS" section.

We haven't opened a case with ESET as we don't really have a requirement to check HTTPS, also as SSL checking is disabled by default I'm not entirely sure what this would have been doing anyway!

 (See: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverTS/thread/f71551fb-9376-42b9-9695-8458ed0ea555)

The SSL section is a bit further down than the HTTP section in NOD's 'Entire Configuration Tree'!

The crazy thing is that if you disable NOD completely, the symptoms persisit.  Only when you follow the precise instructions above do you overcome the problem.

Thursday 1 July 2010

0x8004010f downloading Exchange OAB

As blog title says, in my case it was after a swing migration.

There are lots of causes for this but in this instance all I had to do was go to the properties of the Mailbox store, go to client access tab, and the offline address list field was blank, I just had to associate the default OAB with the store.

Saturday 19 June 2010

OWA 2003 - Log on to other user's mailbox

I needed to log onto one of my client's mailboxes but didn't have access to Outlook at the time.

To access another users mailbox via OWA 2003 (the functionality is built into 2007), log on to OWA as the user with permissions to the other user's mailbox, then change the URL to https://owa.mydomain.com/exchange/useralias/inbox, where useralias is the Exchange alias of the user whose mailbox you wish to access.

Easy!

Thursday 10 June 2010

Problems with Sharepoint after 983444

All my SBS 2008's companyweb sites were broken on Wednesday after 983444 had been automatically applied overnight.  Here are the steps I needed to do to fix the issue:


cd \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\BIN

stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""

stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""

iisreset /restart


Now, at this point if I conrinued with the remaining commands in a batch file, the wizard would fail.  However if I wait a few minutes before running the commands it will succeed, don't know what's going on but if the following fail, wait a moment then try again, or run iisreset /restart then wait a moment then try again:


cd \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\BIN

psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force


Once the psconfig command returns 4/4 succesful, you need to add comapnyweb:80 to the bindings for the sbs sharepoint site in IIS, or to do it automatically, run the SBS 'fix my network' wizard.

Thursday 27 May 2010

SBS 2008 RWW Customisation - add an OEM logo amongst others

Check out C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Data\RWWConfig.xml for lots of customisation stuff.

Saturday 20 February 2010

Exchange 2007 distribution list not receiving emails from external senders

This will be well known to any Exchange 2007 admin but given that all my Exchange 2007 servers are SBS 2008 machines, and that distribution groups created using the SBS wizards are automatically granted this permission, I had not come across this one before.

I usually use the SBS wizards for the tasks they are capable of achieving since this is how the product was designed to be used.  However recently one of out clients merged with another comapny and their SBS is now effectively running two companies, this renders the wizards useless for one company as they have two domains and the wizards are only designed to work with one.  So I had created some distribution groups in Exchange Management Console rather than the wizards but they would not accept email from outside of the organisation, senders receiving a 5.1.1.

A quick search revealed there is a command to be run against Exchange 2007 distribution groups in the shell before they will accept mail from external senders, by default RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled is true:

Set-DistributionGroup "GROUPNAME" -RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled $False

to re-enable:
Set-DistributionGroup "GROUPNAME" -RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled

and, to check status: 
Get-DistributionGroup "GROUPNAME" | Select-Object Name, RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled 

Saturday 23 January 2010

How to change the company name displayed when opening the Remote Web Workplace website on SBS 2008

I needed to change the name displayed on the RWW welcome page on SBS 2008 for one of my clients who had changed their company name.

Browse to C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Data and edit a file called rwwconfig.xml, there is a field called signinorgname which needs to be updated with the new company name, the change is reflected immediately upon saving the file! :)