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Tuesday 30 November 2010

Send As permission for Exchange 2007 Distribution Group

It can be quite handy to be able to send an email as a distribution group sometimes, allowing several users in a group to appear as one generic department email.

The task is a little different to Exchange 2003 as there is no GUI available for this task and it must be completed with the EMS.

The command you need is

Get-DistributionGroup groupname | add-adpermission -user username -extendedrights -Send-As

Once done you then have to wait, it can take some time for this change to propagate so be patient!

Monday 29 November 2010

VMware vCenter Error Call “PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents” for object “propertyCollector” on vCenter Server failed

I had this error randomly when working on vSphere Client 4.1 to a vSphere 4.1 installation. It turns out this is caused because I had an ISO image mapped to a VM CD drive and the ISO file was no longer in the datastore. I removed the ISA from the VM settings and the problem went away.

Thanks to Yuri's Technology Blog for this, I just wanted to re post this.

http://yuridejager.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/vmware-vcenter-error-call-propertycollector-retrievecontents-for-object-propertycollector-on-vcenter-server-failed/

Monday 22 November 2010

Group Policy Management in Windows 7

Don't forget that if you need to make changes for Windows 7 in your Group Policies that you need to download the Remote Administration Kit for Windows 7.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313-a005-4e344e43997d&displaylang=en

Friday 19 November 2010

Measuring SQL Server Performance

I had a customer with a reported slow SQL Server, they run a MRP application and I have several customers with the same SQL database so I had a good bench mark to check against.

I used two tools for this Process Monitor and the now defunct Filemon, both from SysInternals.

I used Process Monitor to look at the disk I/O reads and writes and noted that the customer with the performance issues had disk I/O reads of 88 million and writes of 44 million. I then used Filemon to view the disk read/writes on the SQL Server database disk and I could see up to 400 disk transactions per second.

I compared this to the customer with no problems and they returned 16 million reads and 16 million writes with 15 disk transactions per second using Filemon.

Although there is more to this type of investigation such as the RAID array type, disk spindle speeds, nature of the MRP use and age of the physical servers, I found that this was a good method of getting a good overview of the disk usage and if the disk I/O is the bottleneck on your SQL Server when this type of issue arises with performance.

Security warning when you start Outlook 2007 and then connect to a mailbox that is hosted on a server that is running Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange Server 2010: "The name of the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

If you run SBS Server 2008 and you have a third party SSL Certificate for your Exchange Services you can find this error will occur when users running Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 connect to the Exchange Server. Microsoft provide a KB for this issue here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940726

However the KB references a standard Exchange Server installation and not SBS Server and so the reference to IIS is incorrect.

Ensure that you change the reference to the Default Web Site to the the IIS site that contains the Exchange IIS information, SBS Web Applications.

My server for example is as follows

Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -Identity "SBIZ\EWS (SBS Web Applications)" -InternalUrl https://remote.mydomain.co.uk/ews/exchange.asmx

Set-OABVirtualDirectory -Identity "SBIZ\oab (SBS Web Applications)" -InternalUrl https://remote.mydomain.co.uk/oab

Set-UMVirtualDirectory -Identity "SBIZ\unifiedmessaging (SBS Web Applications)" -InternalUrl https://remote.mydomain.co.uk/unifiedmessaging/service.asmx

Saturday 13 November 2010

Manually uninstall Trend Micro Office Scan Client

Sometimes you cannot uninstall the Office Scan Client so here is the way to uninstall it manually.

1.Go to Control Panel Services (services.msc), and stop the following services:
◦OfficeScanNT Listener
◦OfficeScanNT RealTimeScan
◦OfficeScanNT Personal Firewall (if enabled)

2.Run Registry Editor (regedit.exe)

3.Navigate to the following registry key hive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

4.Delete the following keys (if available):
◦Ntrtscan
◦Tmlisten
◦TmFilter
◦VSApiNt
◦TMPreFilter
◦TM_CFW
◦OfcPfwSvc

5.Navigate to the following registry hive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE\TrendMicro

or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Wow6432Node\TrendMicro (in 64-bit Windows operating system)

6.Delete the following keys (if available):
◦OfcWatchDog
◦Pc-cillinNTCorp or OfficeScanCorp (depending on the client)
◦RemoteAgent
◦PC-cillin
◦CFW

7.Browse to the following registry key hive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

8.Delete the OfficeScanNT Monitor key.

9.Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

10.Delete the OfficeScanNT key.

11.Delete the OfficeScan program group (Trend Micro OfficeScan Client) from the Windows Start menu.

12.Restart the computer.

13.Delete the directories that contain the OfficeScan Client program files, normally located inside Program Files folder.

Sunday 7 November 2010

WIndows 2008 Event ID 39 & 17 Terminal Services

I had a Windows 2008 Terminal Server that had had the certificate expire and I was getting multiple errors issuing Terminal Server licences to the clients. It turns out to be a known Microsoft issue

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2021885

Friday 5 November 2010

Veritas Backup Error "0xe00084af - The directory or file was not found or cannot be accessed"

I have a customer who still runs Veritas Backup Exec version 9.1 and I had recently upgraded WSUS to version 3, I noticed that the overnight backup was now failing each time with the error in the post title.

If I tried to backup any file from the C: drive this error would occur event though the files were accessible in Veritas, a backup of the Information Store or Shadow Copy was successful.

The cause of the error is the SQL Server VSS Writer Service that is installed as part of WSUS 3 application and if this service is running it will cause the Veritas Backup to fail.

All you need to do is use the Pre and Post Backup files to stop and start the service and you can continue to backup as normal and avoid this rather ambiguous error.