Sole's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘How To’

So You went ahead and used virtualized Domain Controllers for Your Active Directory domain, congratulations! I am sure You will be happy with the decission, as long as You have a decent virtualizing environment, this will give You both peace of mind, faster recovery and cheaper redundancy.

There is however some special considerations You must do, when You are using virtual Domain Controllers, not to mention, please with sugar on top, do NOT P2V/Convert Your physical Domain Controllers to virtual, without at least reading this article!

What areas do we need to consider on a virtual DC?

• Time synchronization
• Disk cache
• Suspend/pausing virtual machine
• Snapshots and System State backups
• Performance

Personally I much prefer virtual Domain Controllers, from having a lot of physical ones, but there are some considerations to be made, about perhaps leaving some physical and what features to use on the virtual and what settings to use as well. This article attempts to uncover some of the points to consider, specifically for virtal DC’s. The list is in no way meant to be the only considerations, but is mostly the things that I personally have noticed forgotten in environments I have encountered. Add Your own preferences and research to this and You should be well on Your way to live happily forever with Your virtual DC’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Large companies sometimes have problems with a virus that realy loves administrative shares on other workstations (i.e. c$ and admin$), it will try and break into theese to spread it self directly. The easy option ofcourse being kill the virus or even better harden administrative users and not use administrator rights for normal users! But untill that is an easy, non-political and not so time consuming task, why not disable the administrative shares on the workstations alltogether?

Seems like a perfect thing to do with Group Policy, unfortunately the setting is non-existing default in Group Policies, so by finding the registry key we need to change, a small custom administrative template will do the trick. This could also be used for other registry changes needed with group policy.

We might also want the option to easily enable the administrative shares later, might be used by applications, services, automated installations, etc. Heres is how to do it quick and easy. Read the rest of this entry »

Been reading up on external and internal DNS names used by OCS 2007 R2 ? Your head stopped spinning yet? So you’ve decided on what FQDN’s to use, next step order some SSL certificates, should be easy enough right, You allready figured out You need SLL certificates that are Unified Communications Certificates (UCC) enabled. In my example I will use GlobalSign Domain Validated SAN’s, if I needed multiple domains for example for @sole.dk and @soleit.dk, I would choose GlobalSign Organisation Validated SAN’s instead.

For a GlobalSign SSL certificate to be UCC enabled, it must use SAN domains, no other way of enabling it. So no point in spending lots of budget on seperate SSL certificates for each service. SAN Subdomains are also quite alot cheaper than buying seperate SSL certificates.

One of the tricky parts of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and SSL certificates, is that You can not use one single SAN SSL for all services, if You intend to use port 443 for all services!

Why would we only use port 443 ? Read the rest of this entry »

Most experienced consultants use Google daily to find descriptions of problems and solutions, knowing your way around Google and making a good search, can mean the difference between identifying and solving a problem within minutes or hours.

Many times a customer have asked me how to solve a problem, that I didnt know the answer to on the top of my head, after all there is a lot of issues and only so much memory and experience. Not once have I recieved any negative responses from saying “let me do a little research and i will come right back to you”, on the contrary the customer is happy and relieved that I will help them. Dont drop the ball and say “no sorry cant help you”, must customers dont have the time or experience to search for an answer them self, why else would they be asking. Read the rest of this entry »

All PPTP VPN interfaces in ISA 2006 (sp1) disappeared from the Routing and Remote Access Service console, this problem was a cool problem both because it was challenging but also due to the unexpected results and solutions we found.

The first google attempt at finding a solution told us to try the following workaround – Not recommended!

• Run the following command: C:\> netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt

Well this solution might fix the problem here and now, but you might as well turn to the good old solution of restarting your server every time it fails, because this solution will do the following.

• Enable DHCP and remove all IP configuration of all interfaces.
  Not the smartest move on a server, and you are stuck with having to retype all your settings again.
• Most likely the problem will reappear again, since it does not fix the problem.

Now looking deeper into the error, we started looking at event logs – nothing here to help us (let us know if you had any usefull info here for this error). Then we tried various other things, including looking at a snapshot of the memory usage (you can just open taskmgr.exe) and found something surprising. Wspsrv.exe was using more memory handles than all other processes combined on the machine. A memory leak! It has been several years since I ran into a memory leak, it used to be the most common problem for programmers to avoid, but I rarely see them any more. Read the rest of this entry »

The easiest way (I love easy!) to order and install an SSL certificate on Exchange 2007, is to order a SAN (Subject Alternative Name) certificate with AutoCSR meaning you dont have to create a CSR but instead get a certificate backup file (PKCS#12, P12. PFX). You also save time with the SAN because you only use one certificate for all services and can move services from one domain to another in the certificate with no problems.

Make sure you get a SAN certificate including the full domain name(s) you use to access Outlook Web Access, Outlook Anywhere, Autodiscover and any internal servernames using the certificate (usually free).

The Certificate you order should contain something like this:

• mail.sole.dk and/or owa.sole.dk – for Outlook Web Access
• autodiscover.sole.dk and any other e-mail domain you use with Autodiscover/OA.
• MYSERVER01 and MyServer01.domain.local - and any other internal servername that will be using the certificate

Personally I setup servers to respond only to OWA and ActiveSync on the mail./owa. domain, and use all other services like Outlook Anywhere, etc. on the autodiscover. address, this way I can use Forms Based Authentication/Basic with my OWA/ActiveSync website, and NTLM with my other services. You can see more information about this from my previous blogs here. Some people argue for and against having internal server names in the certificate, but I figure if they are free anyways, and might help why not add them – and if security is so much an issue that internal server names must not be revealed, you have other much bigger problems anyway.

Now some simple commands to manipulate Exchange 2007 SSL certificates. (Stolen from the danish Exchange 2007 guide on FairSSL, I co-authored the manual) Read the rest of this entry »