Lyle Epstein's Systems Engineer Blog

Testing mail for Windows Mobile Smartphones

Recently I had the opportunity to troubleshoot a Windows Smartphone not connecting to an Exchange Server. Every time I attempted to sync it, it would fail. I ensured I had the certificates installed properly, but I was getting nowhere. Eventually I ended up figuring it out, but I wanted to highlight some of the tools I used to troubleshoot it.

The first one is setting up a device emulator to simulate a Windows Mobile phone. This a great tool to use as you don’t even need a real phone, just a PC and a network connection. For detailed instructions on doing this, please take a look at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/09/17/447033.aspx

The second tool I used is the Microsoft site to test Microsoft Exchange connectivity. You can access it at https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/ This is a really great tool, but be warned, if you are using a private certificate, it will fail, not because the certificate is bad, but it has no way to validate a private certificate.

The third tool that I recommend if you want to test on the mobile phone, is a tool that let’s you control the phone from your PC. This is a really nifty tool and is free as well. You can get it at http://www.mymobiler.com/

Good Luck!

Self sending Spam from your own company

I came across this article from Henrik Walther that explains to stop spam coming in to your organization an acting like it is being sent inside.

QUESTION:

It seems like our organization are hit by self-sending spam these days. Spam where *@mycompany.com is used as the sender address, which means the messages are seen as valid by our anti-spam solution.

Do you have any tips on how to stop these types of spam attacks?

ANSWER:

There are two very good things you can do in order to fight back! The first is to add your own domain to the Sender Filtering agent on an Exchange 2007 Hub or Edge Transport server as shown below.
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Figure 5

If you use another anti-spam solution, you should just make sure to add the domain to the blacklist.

The second thing to do is to create a SPF record for your domain on the external DNS servers hosting your domain.
With these two simple steps you should see an instant reduction of the number of self-sending spam mails you receive.
Microsoft has a web-based wizard that will help you create this record. You can find the wizard here.

Best Practices for SBS 2008 running on Hyper-V

I was doing some research for a client today who wanted to run SBS 2008 in a Hyper-V environment along with other servers running in VM’s. I came across a great article on this that I think will really help for future deployments: http://technet.microsoft.com:80/en-us/library/dd239199.aspx

Adding a x86 print driver to a x64 print server

Have you ever tried to add an additional print driver on a Windows 2008 x64 server? If so, you know how it pretty much can’t be done. Here is my recommended way to add x86 drivers for say Windows XP, etc..

1. On any one of the clients machine running 32-bit OS.

2. Access the x64 print server \\PrintserverName\Printers.

3. Open the printer required to add the 32-bit driver.

4. Go to properties.

5. Sharing Tab.

6. Additional drivers.

7. Check the box for x86 for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.

8. Click OK.

Then, locate the INF file of the printer driver for XP 32-bit downloaded driver.

After doing this, you should now be able to install a shared printer from a x64 OS to x86 OS.

Stopping the hackers from other countries

Recently I got a call from one of my customers complaining about user accounts not able to login to the server. After doing some digging in the event log, I soon discovered that FTP was setup, which they use, and outside people from other countries that were not invited to the server were attempting to access it. These would be countries of Russia, China and more. I decided that the best thing to do is to restrict their IP ranges from hitting the server, thus stopping their attempts. A great list of IP address ranges can be found at http://www.parkansky.com/china.htm

If you are not familiar with IP subnetting, a cheat sheet on subnet’s is available at http://www.oav.net/mirrors/cidr.html

In order to identify who is hitting your server, I use the tools at http://whois.domaintools.com to lookup the IP address that is hitting the server.

552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed maximum message size

Have you run into this error on a Exchange 2007 server, or a SBS 2008 box? While working on a clients network this week, I ran into it. After doing some research, a simple modification needs to be made. Open up a Powershell and use the command Set-ReceieveConnector –identity “Default [servername]” –maxmessagesize 20MB

This will increase the size to 20MB.

You also may want to increase the Message size limits for the entire server. If you take a look at Technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124345.aspx?ppud=4 , you can set the connector limits, server limits as well as user limits.

Here is another Blog I came across with the same information as well: http://mymcp.blogspot.com/2007/07/552-534-message-size-exceeds-fixed.html

Document Redirection common mistakes

Often, I run into a common issue where document redirection is not working properly on a Windows XP or Vista workstation. This happens on Windows 2003 & Windows 2008 Server and SBS flavors. The common fix I find is by following this Microsoft article, at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274443

SBS 2008 RWW and Terminal server Gateway services

I was reading through the Cougar beta newsgroups and came across this setup for putting Icons into RWW for terminal services applications.

Internally we have http://cougar-ts/ts and the Calc and WordPad fire up
with no issues. I have another app installed but it looks as though it
will need some customizing to get running. How do I post it to the RWW so that Internet users can get the apps too
please?

1. Export the apps as RDP files
2. Save the RDP files to the path where RWW is hosted on the SBS server
3. Add the RDP MIME type to IIS on the SBS server
4. Add links to the RDP files using the wizard in the SBS console

I hope this works on production machines!

To revise that, what I did was:

1. On the SBS2008 server, i created a mime type of .rdp and set the application type to application/x-rdp

I also researched and found that you can set the mime type to application/rdp but I didn’t try it.

2. I setup the applications on the Terminal Server, and then exported them to .rdp files which I will use to put on RWW. So the next step is copy the files to:
C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Bin\webapp\SBS Web Applications

3. Now launch the Windows SBS Console, and select users, then on the right side select Manage Desktop Links Gadgets. Go down to Organizational links, then add the FQDN URL, i.e. https://remote.publicdomain.com/excel.rdp

4. One last thing I recommend, is modifying the .RDP file to include the following settings:

full address:s:TERM2008.internalFQDN.local <– modify to your settings, but make sure to point to the Term server

gatewayhostname:s:remote.publicdomain.com <– modify this to point to your terminal server EXTERNAL GATEWAY (SBS server, not the TERMINAL SERVER!!!)

domain:s:INTERNALNETBIOSNAME <–put in the internal NETBios name

prompt for credentials on client:i:1

gatewayprofileusagemethod:i:1

That should do it!

interesting website I came across from another SBSer

I was reading some postings today and came across this person’s website. it is quite interesting about SBS 2008 and especially on SharePoint. Here is the link http://costas.cpstechgroup.com

Error you get on SBS 2008 when trying to make a new GPO

While working with SBS 2008, I encountered this error while trying to create a new GPO:

“The data present in the reparse buffer point is invalid”

And then it just drops you back to the GPO editor, not letting you create the new GPO. after doing some research, I found this issue is being caused by the File Server Resource Manager, under Server roles.

Tip, uninstall this item and then make the GPO. The downside is if you uninstall it, you have to reboot. This seems to be a bug in SBS 2008, and I assume will be corrected shortly.

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