I installed Exchange 2010 on a new Windows 2008 R2 server for a customer. I was attempting to do a test move on a mailbox from the old Exchange 2003 server and it failed. I found that the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service was stopped and it would not start. I did some online research and was unable to find a solution.  After further investigation it was discovered that the VaultLogix Classic Agent used for the online backup was using the same port as the Mailbox Replication service. I spoke to a VaultLogix support technician who showed me a registry key that would change the default port from 808 for the agent.

I change “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EVault\InfoStage\Agent\AgentPortNumber” to port 807 and was then able to start the Mailbox Replication service. Read More...

We probably all have many accounts set up on many web sites.  Since it is a very bad practice to use the same password on more that one site,  I have used Password Safe for years for keeping up with accounts and passwords.  I have recently switched to using Lastpass.  Lastpass has a very long list of features.  Here are a few of the features:

• Automatic form filling, like Roboform
• One click login - click on the site, it brings it up and logs on for you
• Synchronizes everywhere - Windows, Mac, Linux, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, even Symbian and Palm
• Generates strong, secure passwords
• Stores miscellaneous notes

Another great feature is a program called pocket.  This stand alone program will download your entire database and save it locally.  It will also decrypt it and export it to a CSV file.  This means if Lastpass ever goes away, you still have all your data which can be accessed or imported into another password manager.

The best feature is how it stores your data.  Everything is encrypted and decrypted locally and the Lastpass servers never have your key or unencrypted data.  The encryption part of the software is very simple.  It just uses a SHA256 hash of your email address (account) and master password for the encryption key. Read More...

If you need to connect to a VPN that uses RSA’s SecurID authentication and if you are using the RSA SecurID App on the iPhone it can be tricky entering the SecurID passcode in the VPN connection dialog.  Fortunately you can copy and paste the passcode on the iPhone.  Open the RSA SecurID app and enter your PIN.  Press and hold the passcode field until the [Copy] appears.  Copy the passcode.  Initiate the VPN connection and paste the passcode in the appropriate field.

Here are some items to consider when upgrading to vSphere/vCenter 4.1:

1. vCenter 4.1 requires a 64-bit OS.
2. Windows 2008 R2 is now officially supported with vSphere 4.1.
3. When asked what account to use for the service, the local system option was greyed out.  I had to enter my current credentials, then go back after the installation completed and change the service account to local system.
4. The Update Manager can upgrade VM hosts.  I had to get the hosts up to version 4.0 before it would work, though.
   

I was setting up Backup Exec 12.5 to function as a VCB proxy to back up our VMs at a VMDK level and ran into a few problems. Version 12.5 has this functionality built in so it was fairly simple to back up a VM from the SAN to the VCB proxy. Restoring it back to the vCenter cluster, on the other hand, was a different story. The first problem I ran into was in running a simple restore. The job would fail as it would try and convert the machine. Simple fix: Install VMWare Converter Standalone on the proxy. Read More...

To find a "lost" window (displays off the side of the screen after undocking from multiple monitors):

XP:  Right click the icon on the taskbar, select "move", then use the arrow keys to move the window to where it is visible.

Windows 7:  Hover your mouse over the icon on the task bar until the thumbnail appears, right-click the thumbnail, select "move" and then move the window with the arrow keys.  Alternately, you can click the icon on the taskbar (so that the application has focus), hold down the Windows key, and press the right or left arrow key.  This will snap the window to the side of the screen.  (Sometimes, you have to hit Windows-arrow multiple times.) Read More...

I have done a couple SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migrations in the past and because the customers were relatively small with less than 20 users, we opted to just build the new SBS 2008 server with a completely new domain and then migrate the data. We would recreate all the user accounts, mailboxes, and shares and choose a maintenance window to do the switchover. It works fine for companies with low complexity and downtime flexibility. However, I just started an SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 migration for a company that operates pretty much 24-7 and they have a fairly high complexity level on the application side.

I have tried some of the SBS 2000 -> SBS 2003 migration tools and they were pretty pathetic, but I had to have an easier way for this migration. After some research, I came across a set of processes that you can use to migrate SBS 2003 -> SBS 2008. They are documented pretty well by Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=52b7ea63-78af-4a96-811e-284f5c1de13b&displaylang=en.  The process is pretty tedious...I won’t get into it here. You can read the doc if you are interested.

The gotcha is what I encountered during the migration install. Read More...

Recently, an unscrupulous individual was trying to setup a fake copy of one of our customers for what was likely a phishing scheme on a server located in Netherlands.  Upon examining the whois record, there was a contact listed as the admin with an address and phone number.  Upon calling the number the individual that answered the phone of course knew nothing about the person that registered the website.  Other entries appeared to indicate that Yahoo was involved in the hosting.  However, in order to actually connect to the website, the DNS records are registered with name servers that are usually from the webhost provider. Below is a screen shot of the Whois results (with some of the information removed). Read More...

I received a machine from a customer that would not boot. The machine had been operating flawlessly for several months… then suddenly it would not boot. The typical error was: “The file is possibly corrupt. The file header checksum does not match the computed checksum. Also, once in a while I got an error from BOOTMGR:.  I ran diagnostics on both of the hard drives (mirrored) in the system from a BIOS diagnostic option and they reported NO errors. Read More...

A customer who has two terminal servers (TS1 & TS2) that can be accessed using a shared name (TS) was unable to access them from their remote sites. I was able to access TS1 and TS2 from a remote server but not TS. I could also connect using the IP of each server but not the shared IP. What I found was that there was a static ARP entry on the main and backup router for TS. The MAC address on the ARP entry did not match the one on the servers. Both of the servers are virtual machines and this was caused by the ESX update and installation of the updated VMTools on the terminal servers the night before. The MAC addresses on the virtual NICs had changed. The ARP entry was removed and they could connect using the shared name.