Archives

Site Status

This site is no longer actively maintained. Blog posts (2008-2017) are for historical search purposes. Thanks!

Archive for SBS – Page 3

Bootstrapper error during Office 2013 installation

by KW · Comments (0)
Jan 24 2015

I was attempting to install Office 2013 Professional Plus on a new workstation that had already been joined to the SBS 2011 domain. It kept crashing just a few minutes into the intallation with the error message: “Microsoft Setup Bootstrapper has stopped working”.

image

If you search the Microsoft forums, you will see several recommendations, including:

  • Remove all prior installations of Microsoft Office
  • Make sure that the Task Scheduler is running
  • Try burning the Office .iso to a DVD to do the install

In my case, we were good in all those departments.

Then I came across a forum post that raised the question:

Have you implemented a Cryptolocker group policy at your site?

Oh, my, yes! I quickly logged onto the server, moved the new workstation out of its normal OU. Voila! Office 2013 installed immediately.

Comments (0)
Categories : Microsoft, Office, Office 2013, Office 365, SBS, Tools
Tags : ,

Do not install Exchange 2010 SP3 RU8 yet

by KW · Comments (0)
Dec 12 2014

On Thursday Dec 11, 2014 Microsoft released new updates for Exchange 2007, 2010, and 2013. Read more here.

However, an issue has been identified in the Exchange Server 2010 SP3 Update Rollup 8. The update has been recalled and is no longer available on the download center pending a new RU8 release. Customers should not proceed with deployments of this update until the new RU8 version is made available. Customers who have already started deployment of RU8 should rollback this update.

The issue impacts the ability of Outlook to connect to Exchange.

Please note: this issue only impacts the Exchange Server 2010 SP3 RU8 update, the other updates remain valid and customers can continue with deployment of these packages.

Comments (0)
Categories : Exchange, Microsoft, SBS, WSUS
Tags :

How to fix WinMail.dat attachment issues with Exchange

by KW · Comments (0)
Jun 30 2014

From time to time I will encounter an Exchange Server where the customer reports that attachments to emails they send out are being received as WinMail.dat files by some recipients. This hold true whether it’s an image file, a PDF file, etc.

The cause is quite simple: The Exchange server has an option to define whether or not to send attachments in “rich-text format”. If this option is enabled, this will cause attachments to be converted by some email clients into a WinMail.dat file. This is due to a methodology called “Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format” (TNEF) for sending messages across the Internet.

The solution is also quite simple: we just need to set the option on Exchange to “never use”. No rebooting of Exchange or the server is required after making this change.

Here are the detail steps (based on Exchange 2010):

  • Open up Exchange Management Console (EMC)
  • Drill down Organization Configuration –> Hub Transport
  • Click (to select) the Remote Domains tab
  • Right-click on Default, then click Properties
  • Click  (to select) the Message Format tab.
  • Under Exchange rich-text format section, click (to select) Never use
  • Click Apply and OK

image

Comments (0)
Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
Tags :

Server NIC icon shows yellow triangle with exclamation

by KW · Comments (1)
Jun 26 2014

Customer has a Windows Server 2012 system, and calls me to say that the NIC icon in the taskbar has a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark. This would normally indicate that there is no network/Internet connection.

image

And, when I opened up Network and Sharing Center, it reports that there is no Internet connection.

But, Internet is working just fine. So, what gives?

This situation will often occur when you have a server with multiple NIC adapters, but only one of them is active, and the others are disabled. And this was exactly the case with this custoer.

The solution is two-fold:

  1. You need to change the binding order to put the active NIC first
  2. And then you need to restart Network Location Awareness and change its default startup condition.

Step 1: Change binding order of NICs

  • Unfortunately, finding out where to change the binding order is not always intuitive. These steps were for the 2012 Server I was working on
  • Locate the network icon in your right taskbar, right click on the icon, and select ‘Open Network and Sharing Center’
  • In the new window that displays, along the left side, click ‘Change adapter settings’
  • A window displays listing your network adapters. Here comes the “tricky part”.
  • Press the ALT key, and a new command menu bar will appear, like this:
    image
  • Click on Advanced, then click Advanced Settings
  • If the active NIC is not listed first, then click to highlight it, and use the arrow keys to the right to move it up.
    clip_image001
  • For more information on changing the network protocol bindings, view this Microsoft article

Step 2: Reset Network Location Awareness service

  • Open up Services control panel (Run –> services.msc)
  • Find the Network Location Awareness service, click to select it, and then select Restart
  • After the service has been restarted, right click on the service, and click Properties.and select to restart it.
  • Go to Startup Type, and change it to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’
    clip_image001[4]
  • Click OK and then close the Services windows
Comments (1)
Categories : Network, SBS, Servers, Windows
Tags :

Microsoft fixes OWA Premium issue when using IE11

by KW · Comments (0)
Jun 26 2014

My fellow MVP’er, Oliver Sommer, posted on his blog site yesterday (6-25-2014) that Microsoft quietly resolved an outstanding issue (KB 2866064) with Internet Explorer 11 and Outlook Web Access (OWA), where it would only display the “lite” version of OWA instead of the full “premium” version.

The fix is included in the following rollups:

Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3 Rollup 13

Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 3

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 3

Comments (0)
Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
Tags : , ,

.Net Updates will break client backups

by KW · Comments (0)
May 13 2014

Microsoft released today (May 13, 2014) a security update for the .Net Framework (KB2960358).

However, after applying this update, client backups on SBS 2011 Essentials, WHS 2011, Server Storage Essentials 2008, and 2012 Essentials will fail.

Microsoft has already released updates to fix this problem:

  • KB2934957 for Windows 2012 Essentials
  • KB2934950 for Windows 2011 Essentials, WHS 2011, WSSE 2008*
    * Please note, before applying this fix, there is a pre-requisite that the server has the appropriate Rollup 4 update applied.
Comments (0)
Categories : SBS, Servers, WHS, Windows
Tags : , , ,

Outlook 2010 displays Autodiscover Security Certificate Alert window at startup

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 06 2014

I had a customer with an SBS 2008 server who called this past week to say that they were getting the following popup alert when starting up Outlook 2010:

The name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

SNAGHTML17ae3bd2

I ran the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test Autodiscover for this customer. And sure enough, it was failing the test to validate the server name.

Certificate name validation failed. Host name xxx.com doesn’t match any name found on the server certificate.

The first article I reviewed was KB 940726. Although the title of this KB article indicates that it was written for Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007, it is also applicable to Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010. It covers how to change the internal URL for the Autodiscover service stored inside Exchange via Exchange PowerShell commands.

However, in my case, the PowerShell command get-ClientAccessServer | fl was showing that the AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri field was showing the correct URL.

SNAGHTML17bae007

In talking with other MVPs, it appears that the issue may have to do with someone making changes to the domain name “A” or “cName”. I am still tracking that down.

But meanwhile, I was looking for a quick solution to at least suppress those popup alerts on a short-term basis, as I was going to be traveling for the next several days.

More research lead me to this blog post from Tipst3r titled: “Turn off Autodiscover for Outlook”, which was a recommendation for adding a registry key called “Exclude ScpLookup”. I gave it a try, but it did not appear to work. Also, I wanted more information as to what this registry key did, and why.

So, on further searching, I found Microsoft’s KB 2212902 titled: “Unexpected Autodiscover behavior when you have registry settings under the \Autodiscover key”. This article listed seven different optional registry settings that one might create and use.

I started working with these options, and found that using the following three options (setting them to a value of “1”) would disable the “security certificate is invalid or does not match” popup window from appearing:

  • ExcludeScpLookup
  • ExcludeHttpsAutoDiscoverDomain
  • ExcludeSrvRecord

image

I’m not one to generally implement a workaround. So part of this was just a desire to understand more what was going on “under the covers”, so to speak. I will be testing out making the recommended changes to the domain records later, but since I will be gone for a week, I did not want to make such changes at this time.

Comments (0)
Categories : Exchange, Outlook, SBS
Tags : ,

SVCHOST.exe spiking CPU

by KW · Comments (0)
Mar 05 2014

I see this from time to time, on both workstations and servers. Your system seems to be extremely sluggish or unresponsive. So you open up task manager and you see that a svchost.exe process using 50% or more of CPU. To complicate the matter, there are more than one svchost.exe processes running.

What is one to do???

In many cases, a recent Windows update may be the cause. But it’s hard to track down which update might be the culprit.

Meanwhile, here is what I will often do to at least quickly address and resolve the issue:

  1. Identify the PID of the spiking svchost
  2. Identify a list of services associated with that svchost occurrence
  3. Stop each service until you find the offender

Here’s the blow-by-blow:

Identify PID of svchost.exe that is spiking

  • Open up Task Manager
  • Click on View –> Select Columns… –> then click to check PID (Process identified)
    image    
    image
  • Click on the Image Name column to sort by name
  • Scroll down and find the PID number associated with the spiking svchost.exe service. In my case, it was PID 844.
    image

Identify list of services associated with that svchost.exe process

  • Leave Task Manager window open
  • Open up a command prompt window, and type TASKLIST /SVC and press enter
  • This will give you a list of specific services associated with each svchost.exe
  • Locate your PID and note all the actual services running under that instance.
    image

Identify specific service causing the spike

  • Open up Services console (Start –> Run –> services.msc)
  • Position the Services and Task Manager windows side by side
  • Now, one by one, from the Services window, locate each service listed for the associated PID, and stop or pause the service.
  • Then see if from the Task Manager window, if the svchost.exe suddenly drops back to normal. If so, you found your problem service!
  • In my case, I often find that Automatic Updates (wuauserv) Windows Management Instrumentation (winmgmt) to be the culprit. In this particular case, it was wuauserv causing the spike
    image

 

* These screenshots were taken from a Windows 2003 server, but the process is that same for other Windows platform. The only big difference is that the Task Manager window has a new format with Windows 8/2012, and they display the PID# automatically, saving you one step!

Comments (0)
Categories : SBS, Servers, Tools, Windows
Tags :

Upcoming Rate Change to Microsoft’s Action Pack Subscription

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 13 2014

For small I.T. owners and developers who are Microsoft Partners, the Microsoft Action Pack subscription has been a huge blessing financially. For one low annual cost, Microsoft provides us access to almost all iof their current product offerings, from Windows 8 to Windows Server 2012, from Office 2013 to Visual Studio.

Microsoft recently announced changes to the Action Pack subscription model, effective February 24, 2014.

image

The change that many will focus on is the price increase, going from $329US to $475US, which is a 30% increase. I agree that that’s a big hike. But before you decide to just walk away from this, here are my thoughts:

  1. The $475 fee is still an inexpensive and easy way to have access to Microsoft’s full line of products – all for the comparable cost of a single Windows Server license. That’s less than $40 a month!
  2. If you are new to the Action Pack program, you may not be aware, but this is only the second price adjustment that Microsoft has made since I first signed up for an Action Pack subscription 12 years ago. The Action Pack subscription fee remained flat at $299 for the years 2003-2010. For years 2011-2013, the price went up to $329.

If you sign up or renew your subscription before February 24th, you can do so at the current $329, thus giving you savings for your first year.

Comments (0)
Categories : Microsoft, SBS, Servers, Tools, Windows
Tags :

Changing Exchange Capitalization on Email Domain

by KW · Comments (0)
Feb 04 2014

I recently had a customer running SBS 2008 with Exchange 2007 ask me if they could have the domain name part of a user’s email address displayed with proper capitalization. As an example, instead of Joe@whitehouse.gov they wanted the email address to go out as Joe@WhiteHouse.gov.

This should be easy to do, I thought. So, I went into EMC and changed the spelling of the email to use capitalization, but it would never take hold. It turns out that simply changing the capitalization of the email address is NOT enough for EMC to recognize that a change has been made.

So here are the three steps required:

  1. Edit the email address for capitalization, but also make a change to the user (left side) part of the email address, then save
  2. Then re-edit the email address, fixing the left side of the email address
  3. Update the Offline Address Book (OAB)

So, let’s give it a try:

Step 1:

  • Go into EMC –> Recipient configuration –> Mailbox –> double click on the specific user –> click on the Email Addresses tab
  • Select the email address to be changed and click Edit
  • Change Joe@whitehouse.gov to JoeXX@WhiteHouse.gov and save

Step 2:

  • Select to edit the email address again
  • Change JoeXX@WhiteHouse.gov to Joe@WhiteHouse.gov and save

Step 3

  • From EMC, click Organization Configuration –> Mailbox –> Offline Address Book tab
  • Right click on ‘Default Offline Address Book’ and click Update
    image
  • Note: you call also do the OAB update using the following PowerShell command:
    update-offlin eaddressbook –identity “default offline address book
    image

These steps should be applicable to both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010.

Comments (0)
Categories : Email, Exchange, SBS, Servers
Tags :
« Previous Page
Next Page »

Categories