Carl’s Blog

Accounts Pro uses SQL DMO, which is depreciated (other components use SMO and are OK), so if using SQL Server 2008 (R2), then download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components onto the Workstations.
This tool (Diagnostics-v2.exe) can be useful for repairing Integration settings, but it will enter an incorrect path for Accounts Pro, so fix that afterwards with the Configuration.exe located at:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Digita Shared\Integration\v2.00\Configuration.exe.
Make sure location/path is correct, for the various apps.

For my own reference..

Exchange 2010 BES Express 5 Configuration
Exchage 2003 is same as for BES Express 4 / BPS, see here.
Exchange 2007 is a bit like 2010, see http://docs.blackberry.com/en/admin/deliverables/14347/Configuring_Exchange_2007_environ_280254_11.jsp

Download / Install Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and CDO 1.2.1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E17E7F31-079A-43A9-BFF2-0A110307611E&displaylang=en

Add User BESAdmin, with mailbox.
Add BESAdmin to BUILTIN\Administrators group on BES machine

Get-MailboxDatabase | Add-ADPermission -User “BESAdmin” -AccessRights ExtendedRight -ExtendedRights Receive-As, ms-Exch-Store-Admin
Add-RoleGroupMember “View-Only Organization Management” -Member “BESAdmin”
Add-ADPermission -InheritedObjectType User -InheritanceType Descendents -ExtendedRights Send-As -User “BESAdmin” -Identity “CN=Users,DC=YOURDOMAIN,DC=local”

Get-ThrottlingPolicy | where {$_.IsDefault -eq $true} | Set-ThrottlingPolicy -RCAMaxConcurrency $null

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name “BES Admin EWS” -Role ApplicationImpersonation -User “BESAdmin”

Notepad \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin\microsoft.exchange.addressbook.sevice.exe.config, set MaxSessionsPerUser to 100000
Restart Exchange Address book svc

Set-RpcClientAccess –Server YOUREXCHANGESERVER –EncryptionRequired $False

Manually create the GC hostname MAPI registry keys, as per http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=KB03304, or use the two reg attached .reg files. This fixes the:
MailboxManager::InitializeProfile - OpenMsgStore (0x80040111)
(followed by)
MailboxManager::SubsystemInitialize - OpenMsgStore (0x80040111)
(followed by)
BlackBerry Messaging Agent Blackberry Agent 1 failed to start. Error code 5305
errors

On Server 2008 x64, SQL Express (2005) will not be installed. Install SQL Express 2008 prior.

Log on as BESAdmin, do the install. BES Express 5 wants you to “name” the Blackberry server, and this should not be the same as the name of the computer itself.

Alternatively, buy an HTC Desire.

http://www.opentaps.org/

I got one of these in for a customer the other day, and since the T300 overview proved popular, I thought I should take some photos of this one too.

Overall it seems a little bit smaller than the T300. Similar weight, slightly lighter. Initial feelings are that it’s a slightly cut cost version of the T300, but in reality everything is just fine. There are more flexible/cheaper processor options, Core i3 replacing dual-core Xeon x33xx of before, and this machine now uses DDR3 memory (ECC as usual).

Noise level is about the same as the T300.

There’s no LCD text display any more.

There is now the option of a PERC S100 embedded/onboard software RAID 0/1, which I’m happy enough with since I was most often using the SAS6i/R with SATA disks before. What I haven’t been able to find out is whether the S100 is enabled in the BIOS even when a non-RAID specification is ordered. I like to buy the servers with a single disk, and buy my disks elsewhere. On this occasion I had to pay £70 for a second 250gb SATA disk from Dell. Ouch. Next time around I will chance it and see if the S100 is always there in the BIOS, since it is otherwise a no-cost option.

As far as slots go, the PCI-X has gone, and we now have physically 1x PCIe x16 slot, 2x PCIe x8 slots, and 2x PCIe x1, but actually they are wired as 2x PCIe x8, 1x PCIe x4 and 2x PCIe x1. Basically the x16 slot only works as x8 and one of the x8 slots only works as x4. This is all according to the printing on the PCB anyway. I haven’t actually read the published specs. All slots are PCIe 2.0.

Chipset is Intel 3420.

Maximum RAM is now 32gb over the T300’s 24gb.

There’s a fancy UEFI based “System Services” (F10 on bootup) Unified Server Configurator built into the ROM, which has a new OS Deployment option built in, so no need to boot from the Dell Installation / System Management DVD, except that the UEFI based OS Deployment tool still required that DVD to load/pre-install the OS drivers from, and also it didn’t seem to work for me anyway! I ended up doing this one just like all the other Windows installations that I do on Dell servers.

There seems to be space for an SD/MMC card reader in the back, not entirely sure what for, and it’s covered with a blank on my machine.

As with the T300, the non-hotplug configuration comes pre-cabled for four SATA drives.

There are now two USB A ports on the motherboard, for backup devices, or even for putting a USB flash disk/key inside the machine and leaving it in permanently.

Enjoy the photos..

Many people know that there is a file called SYSTEM.SAV under \windows\system32\config, along with all the other registry hive files. Most people also know that this is a backup copy of the SYSTEM registry hive, from some time in the past – usually years ago, but when does this file become extremely important and useful, and when and why was it created ?

I thought I would write this blog post to describe some observed behaviour / patterns and how this file needs to be utilised for repairing some sometimes seen damage on XP computers.

The problem I sometimes run into is: Corrupt file system or Windows installation. A repair install is undertaken. After the text-mode part of the re-install, when the GUI starts, you are prompted with message “The file ‘Asms’ on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed. Type the path where the file is located, and then click OK.”

What is interesting here is that the Path in which setup is looking for the installation files is something like \\GLOBALROOT\CDROM\Blah. If you change it to D:\i386 this does not help.

So we hit CTRL-F10 for a command-prompt, then we type sysdm.cpl to fire up system properties, and we look in Device Manager. We can see that the CD-ROM device is broken. This is because of the common broken Upper / Lower filters problem. The cure for this is to enter the registry, under HKLM\System\CCS\Control\Class\4D36E965… (the one that says DVD/CD-ROM drives on the right), and remove the UpperFilters or LowerFilters (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060), then reboot.

So we do the above, reboot (nicely, by clicking cancel on the “asms” prompt, or ending setup.exe through taskmgr). After the reboot, setup will automatically restart from the same point, and we hope that the CDROM drive will be working and setup will be able to find the installation files.

But it doesn’t work! We are back where we started! We hit CTRL-F10 and check in device manager, and in the registry, and the UpperFilters or LowerFilters are back! It’s like we’ve been working on a temporary copy of the registry and not the proper registry! Any changes we made were lost when we rebooted!

Well this is what SYSTEM.SAV is all about. It seems that during the in-place upgrade / repair install, Setup is moving the existing SYSTEM registry to SYSTEM.SAV, and it is dumping that into a new SYSTEM each time it is started, or something to that effect.

So, if we want to make registry changes during setup that will be effective upon reboot/restart of setup, we need to make the changes in SYSTEM.SAV. Go into regedit (CTRL-F10 -> regedit). File -> Load Hive. Find the file SYSTEM.SAV in \windows\system32\config, load it, enter “system.sav” for the name. It will show up under that name. Find the UpperFilters or LowerFilters or whatever you need to modify under the system.sav part that now appears in regedit, make the changes, then highlight system.sav again and go to File -> Unload hive.

Reboot, let setup restart, and watch it work*

*You may need to remove the CD-ROM drive from Device Manager (CTRL-F10 -> sysdm.cpl) and then “Scan for hardware changes”..

So now you understand firstly what system.sav is, you also know when it is from and why this old file is there, and have a practical example of why this is useful to know.

I picked up a Vodafone branded Nokia E72, because I was getting really fed up of my Palm Pre for loads of reasons.

The Vodafone UK supplied E72 doesn’t seem to be sim-locked and took my o2 sim card just fine, but I wasn’t happy with the Voda customised firmware, and I wanted the latest firmware update which isn’t available for the Voda product code.

As I have done many times before, I used Nemsis service suite to change the product code to 0573569, which is some EURO – BLACK product code. This product code had the latest firmware available anyway.

I then used Nokia Software Updater and it told me there was new firmware available and it did the upgrade.

That was over an hour ago and the phone has been bricked since, that is until I did a hard reset just now. Phew!

When the USB cable was plugged into the phone, the Nokia USB Flashing Parent device would be detected in device manager for about 10 seconds, then the phone would bleep and it would disappear. NSS, Nokia Software Updater, and Phoenix all couldn’t see an attached deviced.

I was getting ready to tell my supplier that I’d broke another phone (I had an E55 die after not very long ..)

I’m still not quite sure if it’s *, 3, Green/Dial that have to be held down on the full QWERTY Nokias, or if it was Shift, Space, Backspace. I think it was the latter. Anyway, the phone has sprung into life.

Update: It’s definitely Shift, Space & Backspace. Thanks to everyone for the confirmation. Here is a picture of the keys that need to be held down for the hard reset/factory reset:

The “unauthenticated network” in Vista, which means RDP and many other things do not work (basically, it has broke kerberos) was in my case due to two computers having the same name.

I have no idea why I was allowed to join a Windows 7 laptop called Julian-PC to the domain when there was already a Vista desktop called Julian-PC on the domain.

There were no warnings of duplicate names on the network, but adding a new computer to the domain with the same name as an existing computer caused the existing computer’s Computer/Machine Account to be overwritten in active directory, and so the machine was no longer a working domain member and kerberos/authentication was broken. We were seeing “cds.local 2: unauthenticated network” instead of just “cds.local”.

Hope this helps others.

Try checking that MSXML 4.0 is installed. I spent many many hours tracing the source of a non-functioning finance lender’s system, which was due to MSXML 4.0 not being installed on some of the workstations.

I took a chance on one of these phones from eBay. I was half expecting that they would be unusable without an Avaya system in place (Communication Manager, SIP Enablement Services (SES) etc.), and that they’d basically be Avaya-only.

As luck would have it, they work just fine with FreeSWITCH. I haven’t set up much though. I just called the FreeSWITCH test IVR on 5000, listened to some music on hold and an echo test from FreeSWITCH hosted on this laptop. I am looking forward to playing with the Exchange integration though.

The Avaya IP Telephone File Server application (MV_IPtel) is pretty horrible, and in the end I didn’t use that. I actually went through all the hassle of loading up a CentOS 5 virtual machine on this old pre-hardware-virtualization Ubuntu laptop, just so I could load up that app, and what a waste of time that was.

So, all that needs to be done is:

Firstly, the phone comes out of the box running H.323 firmware. You need to get into the phone’s settings by pressing # when first prompted. The default password is 27238 (CRAFT).
In there you need to change the signalling from H.323 to SIP with the SIG option. This means that upon the next bootup, when the phone finds the 96xxupgrade.txt script, the script will direct it to download the sip firmware.

While you’re in the phone’s setup, set the “File Server” to the IP address of your web server where you will be putting the firmware & config files. Also set the phones IP address if you’re not running a working DHCP server. The IP address of the file/web server should be settable as a DHCP option, I am not sure of the option number though.

You need to download the latest SIP firmware. As of this writing it is version 2.5. Download the firmware from here. Download the zip file.
While you are there, download the 46xxsettings.txt file, as this will become your configuration file where you will fill in the FreeSWITCH / Asterisk IP address/port, and any other options that interest you. Most options are there but commented out with “##”, so you just un-comment and alter accordingly.

Extract the contents of the firmware zip file, and place it, along with the 46xxsettings.txt file into the root of your web server – the 96xx phones use HTTP, not TFTP.

Edit the 46xxsettings.txt file: un-comment (remove the two ##’s from the beginning of) the SIP_CONTROLLER_LIST line (about line 2829 in my version of the config file), and edit the line according to the IP address and transport type of your SIP server. In my case, I am using plain SIP over TCP on port 5060, so that line looks like this:
SET SIP_CONTROLLER_LIST 192.168.1.1:5060;transport=tcp

Save that file, boot up the phone and let it do its stuff. When the phone asks you to log in, you just enter a valid extension number and password and you’re away. Now, I’d better go and buy some more of these phones before they’re all gone off eBay!

This is the second time I have encountered this now. Both sites were completely unrelated and had different IT admins. In each case, for whatever reason EAS was not working, probably due to SSL problem or IP address restrictions, but in trying to fix the problem, the IT person left the machine with ExchangeVdir set to /exchange-oma, but no such virtual directory in IIS.
To fix, I simply removed the ExchangeVdir registry entry, but according to MS KB article 817379, on SBS 2003 the key should indeed be set, and a virtual directory should exist called exchange-oma. Therefore, it seems that the IT person is doing the re-build of Exchange IIS virtual directories (as per the well known MS KB article where you do the metabase edit), but the re-build does not create the SBS-only non-standard exchange-oma directory. I am guessing that the CEICW recreates the exchange-oma virtual directory, otherwise it must be manually created as per kb817379.

In any case, this is something to look for when EAS does not work. The IIS logfiles show the requests for /exchange-oma, which does not exist.

The key issue here is that in attempting to fix a problem, the IT person compounds the problem with exactly the same symptoms but a totally different cause. They probably then move on and fix the initial cause of the problem, but it still doesn’t work because they just goofed up the ExchangeVdir stuff.