TechPublishing Now MS Certified

TechPublishing Now MS Certified
Professor Robert McMillen, MBA Microsoft Certified Trainer and Solutions Expert

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Windows Bugs and More

It was our own server that went down yesterday. We were here until late into last night troubleshooting our server after we tried to do a Windows update to install Sharepoint 2010. The update not only made the server boot extremely slow but it changed our automatic services to disabled, such as Exchange 2007.
When I tried to enable it as automatic it would cause the services program to freeze up.
One thing many people should be aware of with Server 2008 is that there is no system restore and no way to do a Windows repair like you could with previous versions of Windows server.
Since it was a Microsoft bug we decided to call them. Although we get free support from our Microsoft Gold Partner status, a lot of people don't realize you can get free support no matter who you are if your server went down due to a Microsoft update.
After calling them we had to wait many hours for a call back but eventually they sent us the fix for it. We had to make a registry entry DWORD to place a higher priority on HTTP proxy than was set by the update. Afte rthat we rebooted and changed the status of our services to automatic and it all came back up.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Portland ITEC show

Went to the Portland ITEC show. It was moved to a smaller venue due to less people wanting to spend money on a booth. We partnered with IBM and brought out our Blade Center for show and tell. I gave a speech on the changing times for IT staff brought about by the cloud. I think it went pretty well, but I had the lunch hour talk and people were munching away and not responding as much as most of the talks I give.
It was still fun and we are following up on all the leads.

Calendar items delayed in Exchange 2003

I noticed that if you send a calendar item or update to a user from an Exchange 2003 server to someone with an Exchange 2007 server you may get a message delayed error or it will fail. Sometimes you get the error but the message goes through. All very strange. It has to do with 2007's inability to deal with 2003's message headers. A hot fix from Microsoft fixed us right up however.
Here is the URL to the article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938650

Friday, June 11, 2010

Upgrade to SBS 2008 from 2003 problems

I had another difficult one today. When upgrading to 2008 SBS from 2003 you first have to make sure that SBS service pack 1 is installed. This is not the same as Windows 2003 SP 1 or 2. So after trying to install that it says that KB891193 has to be installed. So I download that and it gives me an error about not being able to find the specified path.
It turns out that if the clientapps folder either gets moved, or has its permissions changed then that update won't work and you can't move forward. So go into regedit and lookup the following key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\clientsetup]
"ClientAppsRoot"="C:\ClientApps"
Check to see if that destination  exists and you have full permissions to everything. Also you need tobe logged in as the administrator with full default rights. Since it's a domain controller you can't log in as the local administrator, but you still have to be in as the domain administrator.
Once that's run you can now run the SBS service pack 1. These files are both over 200 MBs so make sure you have time and bandwidth to download them from Microsoft.
After that you can continue with the migration.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Finally, an MCITP

I passed the 70-647 test today which is the third and final test to get my Microsoft Enterprise MCITP. There are only 15k of us worldwide at this point. This compares to around 400k back in the NT 4 version. This test was a little harder for me than the 70-649. I studied months for it and I found it much easier. The test I took today I only studied for a couple of weeks. I didn't get as good of a score, but a pass is a pass. Plus there were a bunch of questions that were not on any study guide or in any book, so I had to really think hard about what I was reading.
I have been studying for so long I am having study withdrawal. Decided to watch a scary movie. Should be fun sleeping tonight.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Access to Exchange 2007 mailboxes has changed

I was trying to help a customer open another person's mailbox after upgrading to Exchange 2007. The old way was to give administrator rights in System Manager in exchange 2003, but that no longer works with this new version. I went in and gave full permission rights in 2007 after hunting it down, but even that didn't work.

If you are an administrator trying to get access to everyone's email there is a command in Exchange Power Shell to do it.
get-mailbox | Add-mailboxpermission -User yourdomain\yourusername -AccessRights FullAccess

You still can't open it in Outlook using file- open- other user's folder, but you can add it as a separate profile. From there you can share the inbox or any other folder to open it in your profile later.