Carl’s Blog

I have just installed the beta of Exchange 2010.

It seems that when accessing OWA through Firefox or Epiphany on Linux, we’re only given the option of OWA Light, therefore exactly the same experience as with Exchange 2007.

Firefox on Win32 works as expected. How obviously intentionally lame.

Fortunately we can override the useragent in both Firefox and Epiphany (my preferred browser due to FF’s annoying right-click Linux bug).

Go to about:config in the address bar, click on the “I’ll be careful” thing to carry on, and right-click, create a new String, called general.useragent.override with the following as the data:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8

Close and reopen Epiphany or Firefox and Exchange 2010’s OWA Premium works perfectly

Note: you must close all Epiphany or Firefox windows for this to take effect.

Even better is that you can use Prism to launch OWA “as an application”. You will need to edit /usr/share/prism/default/preferences/webrunner-prefs.js and add the following line:

pref(“general.useragent.override”, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8″);

See screenshot below:

OWA Premium from Exchange 2010 launched through Prism on Ubuntu Jaunty

RRAS won’t start because service “NetBIOSGroup” failed to start.

This is due to broken “NetBIOS Interface” service, which provides “Group = NetBIOSGroup”.

Import the following .reg file and reboot the server: http://www.css-networks.com/netbios.reg

The server is all done. One last thing to do – resize that Dell OS partition now that we have the Data partition on a separate 500gb RAID1.

Being an old fashioned person (read: not a Vista user, and new to SBS 2008), I didn’t think to use Disk Management to do the resize. I used Acronis Disk Director. This resulted in the system not booting, with the above error message.

I was at a bit of a loss for what to do. I ran chkdsk from an NTFS bootdisk and this made no difference. Obviously there is no boot.ini any more, and to make matters worse, the Dell supplied SBS 2008 DVDs are non-bootable, so I was a bit stuck.

Whilst waiting the 2hrs for the SBS 2008 DVD ISO to download from Microsoft.com, I thought I’d try out a Vista disk and see if that would repair the bootmgr. It did and now all is well.

The problem is apparently caused by the UUID of the partition changing, leaving the bootmgr unable to find it, as per this article.

Today I had to knock together a backup solution for a small company who have a very old SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 machine running some bespoke application, a Windows SBS 2003 machine running the usual, and a Mac OS X machine running err, OS X Tiger, all backing up to a USB hard disk on the director’s Windows XP computer.

I decided to use Rsync from the Samba people. It sounded good, but I had a lot of problems along the way with Rsync protocol errors between the SCO box and the XP machine. These problems mostly went away when I changed to using the rsync.exe provided in the Deltacopy package, rather than the one provided in the cwRsync package.

The backup script that I created is found below. It requires Devcon which you can find on Microsoft’s website with the help of Google. The “devcon remove” string at the bottom of the script will probably need the USB\VIDxxxx string changing to reflect that of your USB drive. Check in the details tab of Device Manager on the USB Mass Storage Device to see what the VID ID is. Leave the asterisk (*) at the end in the devcon remove line.

The clever part, in my opinion, of this script is that it will search for the USB hard drive and identify which drive letter has been assigned. Therefore, if the drive is usually assigned G:, but happens to be assigned H: for some reason (incorrect removal of the USB drive leaving a ghost G:  for example), then the script will still work. It does this by looking for a file named drvid.txt on the USB drive, so make sure you create that file on there. I had to make the script call itself in order for the for loop to work on the drvid part. For some reason using “if exist” with a colon, e.g. “if exist f:\drvid.txt” within a for loop is not possible within a batch file, but is possible from the command-line directly. Weird.

You will of course need to have rsync on the Windows machine. I downloaded Deltacopy (after struggling with cwRsync) and simply copied all the files from the Deltacopy directory into c:\windows\system32

What the script doesn’t do is character set conversion from the Mac. This is something I need to look into, as the Mac allows weird filenames, even asterisks in folder names, which of course poses quite a problem.

Also note the drive letter list within the brackets of the for loop. I have intentionally ommited some drive letters, those assigned to network drives and card readers. You will want to populate this properly, perhaps everything from E to Z.

Anyway, here’s the script, or you can download at http://www.css-networks.com/RsyncBackup.cmd

@echo off
SET CYGWIN=nontsec
if %1.==. goto noparams
goto drvid

:noparams
Echo Scanning for external HDD.
devcon rescan
ping localhost -n 30>NUL

for %%a in (g h j k l n o p q u r s t v w x y z) do call %0 %%a

:drvid
if exist %1:\drvid.txt goto found
goto end
:found
Set DRVID=%1
echo Drive found as %DRVID%:
ping localhost -n 30 >NUL
:doeric
Echo.
Echo Rsyncing SCO (Eric) Machine
rsync -avz 192.168.1.2::root /cygdrive/%DRVID%/Eric/
:doserver
echo.
Echo Rsyncing Windows Server Data
rsync -azv “192.168.1.1::Network Shares” /cygdrive/%DRVID%/Server
:dosimon
echo.
Echo Rsyncing Simon’s Data
rsync -azv “192.168.1.11::documents” /cygdrive/%DRVID%/Mac/Documents
rsync -azv “192.168.1.11::250gb” /cygdrive/%DRVID%/Mac/250gb
:remove hdd
Echo.
Echo Peparing external HDD for removal
devcon remove USB\VID_152D*
ping localhost -n 30>NUL
pause
:end

I encountered this problem when trying to back up a SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 box to a Windows XP machine using Rsync 3.0.5 on the SCO box and cwRsync (3.0.5) on the Windows machine.

Having tried all sorts, I eventually changed the Windows side to using the rsync 3.0.4 that comes with Deltacopy instead of using cwRsync.

I then ran into a different problem: “Integer overflow – attempted 64 bit offset
rsync error: requested action not supported (code 4) at ../io.c(381)”

This seems to have gone away after I returned to rsyncing the whole filesystem rather than just a subdirectory.

If the machine already has SQL Server or SQL Express on there, the BPS installer will not automatically create an SQL instance. You can either use an existing instance (i.e. tell the installer to create the Blackberry database on the SERVER\SHAREPOINT instance), which may confuse other sysadmins later and result in accidental removal of the Blackberry database, or you can install SQL 2005 Express yourself manually, which is what I do. It’s in the tools folder after you have extracted the BPS archive. Deselect “Hide Advanced Configuration Options” during the SQLEXPR install, and name the instance something useful like “BLACKBERRY”. You do not need User-Instances enabled.

Here’s the quick setup guide that I wrote after watching the videos. The written install guide is rotten. It makes a simple process look so tough:

Add user BPSAdmin, create Exchange mailbox.
Add to group Administrators (if you forget this you’ll know about it later when you’re unable to logon to the server locally as BPSAdmin).

Active Directory Users & Computers -> View -> Advanced Features
Domain Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Add BPSAdmin -> Apply onto: User Objects -> Send As

Regedit: HKCU->Software->microsoft->Exchange->ExAdmin-> New DWORD ShowSecurityPage=1
Exchange System Manager -> Right-click Org -> Delegate Control -> Next -> Add BPSAdmin -> Exchange View Only Administrator
Right-click Org -> Properties -> Security -> BPSADmin -> Allow Administer IS, Receive As, Send As.

Log off.

Log on as BPSAdmin

Start BPS setup, accept all defaults, enter the BPSAdmin password.

Set up device as usual – Options -> Advanced Options -> Enterprise Activation.
When entering the email address, use space bar instead of @ and dot.

Old hard drive is E: (mounted through USB to IDE adapter)

New system is C:

C:

cd \

mkdir Application

xxcopy e:\Application c:\Application /clone /TC

Since CopyControl relies on the created/modified/accessed timestamps of the files within the hidden/system control directory of the application, the above will preserve them and CopyControl won’t be aware that the application has been copied to a new computer.

The /TC flag to XXCOPY causes it to preserve the file created, modified, and accessed timestamps, to the exact second. Whilst transferring Recruit to a new server late one evening a couple of years ago, I experimented and discovered that this was how the protection scheme (CopyControl) detected tampering/copying. At that time I used a tool called 12Ghosts FileDate or something, but XXCOPY does all this for us now. I am in the process of migrating five computers in a leasing company and am using this quick and easy procedure for transfering the DOS based quoting system which also uses CopyControl.

Some example applications: Oxford Software’s Recruit, LeasePlan / Network Lease’s Ultinet quoting system.

You can tell the application uses CopyControl because there is either a local or network folder which contains a hidden/system folder named something.NNN where NNN is some numbers, e.g. 489. Within that folder are some more files, one called something.CCC and also a file called CCONTROL.

This CopyControl is not the same as the one used by the music business on audio CDs.

This is due to the print spooler service not running, or dying during the install.

You may also find that the print spooler service frequently dies – “spoolsv.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close”, or the Printers and Faxes folder frequently appears empty – i.e. all your printers are missing.

NetSupport Manager or NetSupport PC Duo version 8 on Windows XP SP2 will cause this to happen. Update NetSupport and all will be well.

It is possible to stop Outlook prompting for the user’s password when using RPC/HTTP (Outlook Anywhere / Outlook via Internet) on a client running Windows XP Home or Vista Home Edition. We already know how to do this on XP Pro/Vista Business, even if the XP Pro/Vista Business machine is not joined to the domain, by using “Manage Network Passwords” within User Accounts.

Home Edition of Windows does not have the ability to either join the domain, or save network passwords, so we have to configure the workgroup-based machine as if we were trying our best to integrate it into a domain environment.

As per my previous article, lmcompatibilitylevel was set to 2, mutual-auth not enabled, NTLM authentication, and the certificate was imported to the “trusted root certification authorities” store.

The Home Edition client was configured as if it was to be accessing a server in a domain. That is:

• Workgroup name was set to the netbios domain name of the company (OURDOMAIN)
• The user account name was the same as the user account in the domain. If this does not match, simply changing the account name in User Accounts will not suffice. All that does is change the “Full Name”, not the Username. It needs to be either done through “Local Users & Groups” within Computer Management (if that exists on Home Edition.. ?), or a new account must be created with the name exactly as the username on the domain.
• The user’s password on his Home Edition client was set to the same as on the domain. The user was instructed not to change his password.

The two users are not being prompted for their password when launching Outlook outside of the office. It’s been a couple of weeks now since I set them up.