Sole's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Tips and Tricks’

For the last couple of months, and some months ahead, I am working primarely on migration projects, currently I have just finished developing a lot of scripts to automatically migrate from Novell & ZenWorks to a purely Microsoft environment. So I might share some tips and tricks from my experiences.

Trying to uninstall Novell printers automatically with VBScripting in a login script gave me a headache, for some reason the good old function WshNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection would fail every time trying to uninstall a Novell printer. After some searching and testing I found that by executing a command to RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry, I could successfully uninstall the printers. My personal experience shows no warnings or errors to the user, as long as the computer can still access Novell, however I did have some warning messages appear when the computer could not connect, but the printer was still deleted, and the user could not abort it, so in my book thats a success!

Also i found some examples removing the printers with /dn instead of the /dl that I am using 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 »

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. 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 any other server that will be using the certificate

Personally I setup servers to respond only to OWA on the mail./owa. domain, and use all other services like Outlook Anywhere, ActiveSync, etc. on the autodiscover. address, this way I can use Forms Based Authentication with my OWA website, and NTLM with my other services. 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 a danish SSL certificate reseller – thanks!) Read the rest of this entry »

 When using Microsoft Remote Assistance to help users in a company (why not it’s free), it can be helpfull to have a shortcut to Offer Remote Assistance somewhere handy. But for some reason the only way to find Remote Assistance is by going thru Help in Windows XP. You can however make a small shortcut your self, simply by creating a shortcut and pasting the following link in it. In Vista you can even install a gadget with the Offer Remote Assistance form in it.

Remote Assistance might not be the easiest thing to get working, but once it works it is a nice support tool to have and the best part of it is its free, it comes preinstalled in your clients, so why not use it? Even if you have something else running it is still a free tool to use just in case. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the automatic updates service is interupted while updating the machine, this can result in updates with corrupted data that prevents the service from installing the updates correctly and failing the service. This means the machine will never get past the updates that are giving an error and continue to try and install over and over. This happens on just about any Windows machine that uses Automatic Updates, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

• The error prevents the workstation or server in installing updates, roll up packs, hotfixes and service packs, both manually and automatically.
• The error can also be that the Cryptographic service will not start correctly.
• The event error message contains information like not able to verify integrity of update.inf and similair.
• The error is in the verification of the update in Microsoft, this authentication is done with certificates by the Cryptographic service. 

The reason I am describing this error, is that it seems pretty normal, it can happen from servers being shutdown due to power failure, crashes, etc. It took me some while to find any good information on how to correct this error, or more correctly I found alot of information but little that helped.

Read the rest of this entry »

We had a customer asking for the main part of their Sharepoint website to be accessible from the public with anonymous access, and still have a part of the website require authentication thru Forms Based Authentication (FBA) in ISA 2006 firewall. Since ISA can only have one listener on a website, and the authentication is set on the listener, this was a little bit tricky to solve.

The solution however is extremely simple and I hope this little bit of information will save someone else some time. Read the rest of this entry »