Squidworks

[Solved] – Problem loading a certificate to be used for STARTTLS Purpose in Microsoft Exchange 2007

Generally this condition occurs if anyone of the following conditions is true:

1. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) that is specified in the Warning event has been defined on a Receive connector .

2. Send connector on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 transport server, and no certificate is installed on the same computer that contains the FQDN in the Subject or Subject Alternative Name fields.

3. A third-party or custom certificate has been installed on the server and it contains a matching FQDN. However, the certificate is not enabled for the SMTP service.

The warning event indicates that there is a problem loading a certificate to be used for STARTTLS purposes, here is how to resolve these issues.

1. Open “Exchange Management Shell”.

2. Write “get-ExchangeCertificate” and press on “Enter” button.

3. Write down the Thumbprint of the certificate that reflect the required FQDN name of the server.

4. Review the current certificate that use by the Exchange server and

each certificate function.

5. Write “Enable-ExchangeCertificate -Thumbprint ThisIsYourThumbPrintKey -Services “SMTP”

and press on ‘Enter” button. Replace “ThisIsYourThumb…” with the value of -Thumbprint obtained in stage 3.

6. Restart the Exchange server.

Now your cooking with SSL Security!!.

Enjoy

Cubert 😎

For Creating a Certificate or Certificate Request for TLS check the below article

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998840.aspx

How to display hidden device drivers in Windows Device Manager

Ever wanted to find that other ethernet device that was pulled from you system but don’t see it anymore in Microsoft Windows Device Manager? What about a pesky AOL adapter driver or some other non existant device that you want to get rid of?

In order to show hidden devices:

Right click My Computer and Select Properties
Click Advanced tab
Click Environment Variables
Below the bottom Environment Variables window pane (System Variables), click New
For Variable Name, enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices
For Variable Value enter 1
Click OK. OK to close My Computer
Open Device Manager, click on View, select show hidden devices from the menu. Most of the orphans will be in non-plug and play drivers and the icons will appear grayed out. You can right click the grayed out driver and click uninstall.

Enjoy

Cubert 😎

[Solved] DefaultThrottlingPolicy has gone over budget ‘xxx’ times for component ‘RCA’ within a one minute period – Event log

In Exchange Server 2010 SP1, client throttling policies are used to manage the performance of the Exchange organization. All client throttling policies are enabled by default i in Exchange Server 2010 SP1. The throttling policy has group settings that control the amount of resources that a user or a connection can use.

Throttling Policy settings are only applicable for Exchange Server 2010 SP1 and later. If the application event log on the Exchange or SBS2011 servers displays an error message similar to the following example, then the throttling policy settings are applicable to your system:

Process Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.Service.exe (PID=XXXX). User ‘Sid~ServiceAccount~RCA~false’ has gone over budget ‘XXX’ times for component ‘RCA’ within a one minute period. Info: Policy:DefaultThrottlingPolicy_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, Parts:ABC:XXX;’. Threshold value: ‘110’

If you are experiencing slow Exchange email ingestion that may be caused by these policies, you can modify client throttling policy for an archive service account.

Complete the following steps:

Create the throttling policy: on a computer that hosts the Microsoft Exchange Management Shell, open the Microsoft Exchange Management Shell. Enter the following:
New-ThrottlingPolicy My_New_Policy
Configure the throttling policy by entering the following:
Set-ThrottlingPolicy My_New_Policy -RCAMaxConcurrency 150
Apply the throttling policy to archive service account by entering the following:
Set-Mailbox “MyUserName” -ThrottlingPolicy My_New_Policy

The My_New_Policy can be any name you want to call policy, The My_UserName is the mail box name of the person or account you want to add to the new ploicy.

How to force the Offline address book to update in Microsoft Outlook

How to force the address book to update
When a new email account is created in Exchange it will not normally appear in the address book of others until the following day. This procedure shows how to force newly created accounts to be visible in the address book:

1.Force an address list update on the Exchange server
2.Pull down the address list in Outlook.

Force an address list update on the Exchange server
1.On the server running Exchange, open Exchange System Manager.
2.Expand “Recipients”.
3.Select “Offline Address Lists”
In the default configuration there will only be one offline address list shown in the right hand pane – “Default Offline Address List”. If other address lists have been created then they will also be listed.
4.Right click the address list to update (typically “Default Offline Address List”) and select “Rebuild”

A message will be shown warning that this may take a long time depending on the number of recipients in the domain. Allow it to rebuild the offline address list.
Pull down the address list in Outlook
This needs to be done on each pc running outlook which requires the latest address book:

1.Start up Outlook.
2.Tools → Send/Receive → Download Address Book…
3.On the “Offline Address Book” dialog click [OK]

Enjoy

[How To] – Patching Standalone vSphere 5 ESXi Hosts

So you have a standalone ESXi host or 2 that needs to be patched with the latest updates coming out of VMWare and you do not have a VCenter or are otherwise using the VMWare Update Manager. Here is the basic steps to get you updated and all patched up.

Here are the steps to getting your ESXi 5 Host patched.

Download the patch file you want directly -> Get VMware Patches Here
Enable SSH for remote support on the ESXi Host by accessing the (Security Profile) under Host Configuration.
Place ESXi host is in Maintenance Mode.
Using the vShpere Client browse your local datastore and make a directory called “Updates”, select this new folder and upload the patch zip file bundle to this folder.
SSH into Host and execute the following command. (Replace [DATASTORE] and [PATCH_FILE] with your actual file information.

esxcli software vib install -d /vmfs/volumes/[DATASTORE]/Updates/[PATCH_FILE].zip

You should get the following installation result.

Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.

Afterwards you should reboot the ESX host and upon it’s return it should now be patched with the build you applied above.

NOTE: If you try and use the old esxupdate command, which is still there, you will get this message:

~ # esxupdate Usage: This program is not meant to be used directly. Please use esxcli image/software instead.
esxupdate: error: Command must be specified Usage: This program is not meant to be used directly. Please use esxcli image/software instead.

App Assure – Replay Core Mountability check for ‘Mailbox Database’ failed: Exchange database engine error: Error closing database

With App Assure you may get the following errors after a new install of a Replay Core server and an the agent running on a Exchange 2010 server database.

Error

Thread: 2520

Logger: DsmRpChecker

Context:

Source Location: DsmRecoveryPointChecker.cpp:341

Details:

Mountability check for ‘Mailbox Database 0401075076’ failed: Exchange database engine error: Error closing database

and/or

Error

Thread: 2520

Logger: DsmRpChecker

Context:

Source Location: DsmRecoveryPointChecker.cpp:341

Details:

Mountability check for ‘Mailbox Database 0401075076’ failed: Exchange database engine error: Unable to initialize JET session. See log for details.

There is a known issue with Exchange 2010 running on SP1 with RollUps where this problem is experienced.

Please apply the below registry fix to the Replay Core server, and capture a new recovery point (snapshot) from the protected server to resolve the issue. Furthermore, after deployment of this fix you can go back and check the past recovery points that failed and “Force Recovery Point Check” to confirm they are good as well and get the green check symbol assigned to them.

Modify the registry on the Replay Core at the following location and assigned the specified value below:

Navigate to the location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\AppAssure\ReplayDSM\EseConfig

Modify value for “ForceDeleteUnicodeIndex” (type REG_DWORD) and assign a value of 2.

I hope this helps some one out there..

Enjoy 😎

Cubert

[Solved] A problem prevented Customer Experience Improvement Program data from being sent to Microsoft, (Error 80004005).

Customer Experience Improvement Program data fails to upload.

This alert is generated when a failure to upload the CEIP data to Microsoft fails on servers where you opted to be included in the CEIP. This is usually a firewall issue but sometimes admins may also have inatvertantly select to be included and really don’t want to be. To fix this or really turn it off you will find the task in the Task Scheduler under the Customer Experience Improvement Program.

1.Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Task Scheduler.
2.In the tree pane, open Task Scheduler Library, open Microsoft, open Windows, and then select Customer Experience Improvement Program.
3.In the results pane, Right Click the Uploader task and select to disable.

This will prevent the task from running and stop any more alerts.

Enjoy

Cubert

[Kaseya Script] Modify/Disable TCP Global Parameters on Windows systems

Need another Kaseya agent procedure? Here is one I use alot.

This article describes the TCP Chimney Offload, Receive Side Scaling (RSS), and Network Direct Memory Access (NetDMA) and other features that are available for the TCP/IP protocol inside of Windows. I have spent probably hundreds of hours on cases involving TCP Offloading and I know most of the signs (intermittent dropped connections, missing traffic in network traces, RDP blank windows, etc…).

I created a Kaseya script that goes and disables many of these NIC features Windows puts in their OS that causes so much havoc at times.

Download Script here -> Procedure_Network_feature_shutdown

It is pretty basic, it sets several registery values and runs several shell CMDs using netsh to disable these protocols.

I hope this helps some of you out there.

Cubert.

[Kaseya Scripts] Repair VSS Writers on Windows Servers Agent Procedure

Are you having VSS issues? Need a script to launch when either errors are reported or as a point and shoot script to repair VSS writer issues? Well Cubert has created a new VSS script that is fairly simple in nature but gets the job done nicely. This Kasey Agent Procedure was written for Kaseya 6+ RMM and has 2 parts.

Part 1: Is the VSS-RESET.bat batch file that does the actual work by shutting down the services and re-registering the dlls used by the different VSS Writers. Afterwards it outputs a file to the temp directory with a printout of the VSS writer list cmd.

Part 2: Is the Kaseya Agent procedure that copies the batch file to the system and executes it. It then waits a few minutes for everything to complete and then grabs the report file generated by the batch file and places it on the “GetFile” tab under your [Agent data] menu item inside of LiveConnect.

You can review the report file to see if you are still generating errors after the repairs are preformed.

Download Agent Procedure here -> VSS-RESET

I hope this helps someone out there is Kaseya land!

Cubert.

[VB Script] Automate the copy of folders across the network to a local removable drive in Windows.

So you need a quick method to grabing folders from a UNC path and place a copy of them on a removable drive. I had a customer who wanted to do the old USB drive swap for off site backup storage. I tried to explain that now with the advent of the cloud we could move the files off site without any user intervention but they really wanted to do it manually.

So here is a Automated script to help with a manual process.

Download Script Here

Here is the basic beak down of the script.

In the first part of the script we set the email server to relay mail to, our domain name and the email addresses we want to send reports to.

‘ Company Internet Domain Name
ODomain = “mydoamin.com”
‘ Set the SMTP server IP
oMyIP = “192.168.1.5”
‘ Where do you want the message to be delivered
oTo = “myemail@mydomain.com;another@email.com“

This next part sets up the local directory we will be copying to, The script during execution will delete all things off the drive and then rebuilds the directory structure you want so we have to tell it the directory we want added back after the delete.

‘### Check folders exist and prep for copy

Dim oName, ODomain, oMyIP, oTo, newfolder, newfolderpath
Set FSO =CreateObject(“scripting.FileSystemObject”)

‘###Change my folder path ######################
If FSO.FolderExists(“F:\Backup\”) Then
   FSO.DeleteFolder “F:\Backup”
   wscript.sleep 90000
End If

‘##### Change My folder path#########
newfolderpath = “F:\Backup”
If Not FSO.FolderExists(newfolderpath) Then
   Set newfolder = FSO.CreateFolder(newfolderpath)
   wscript.sleep 5000
End If

Now we need to start the actual copy and get some files on our removable disk. You will need to edit the “newfolderpath” so it reflects where you want the files copied to. You will need to edit the FSO.CopyFilder so that it resembles your UNC path. You can copy the em=ntire code block and repeat over and over again for multiple UNC paths or folders.

‘###Grab files and place them in new folder (We must create that new folder now)

‘### Change my new folder path ###################
newfolderpath = “F:\Backup\MyNewfOLDER”

If Not FSO.FolderExists(newfolderpath) Then
Set newfolder = FSO.CreateFolder(newfolderpath)
End If

FSO.CopyFolder “\\MyIP Address\MyShare\MyFolder”, “F:\Backup\mYNewFolder” ,True
wscript.sleep 5000

‘### You can copy the top several lines starting with the new folder creation and repeat as many times as needed. This will allow for mulitple locations and folder

Next we write an event log in windows reporting that we completed the copies.

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
strCommand = “eventcreate /T Warning /ID 99999 /L SYSTEM /D ” & _
Chr(34) & “The Script has completed the scheduled backup copy to the offsite drive (F:)” & Chr(34)
WshShell.Run strcommand

Then we send off a email to the users we set in the above script area.

‘ Get the computer name
Set WshNetwork = CreateObject(“WScript.Network”)
oName = WshNetwork.ComputerName
‘ Set the visual basic constants as they do not exist within VBScript.
‘ Do not set your smtp server information here.
Const cdoSendUsingMethod = “http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing“, _
cdoSendUsingPort = 2, _
cdoSMTPServer = “http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver”

‘ Create the CDO connections.
Dim iMsg, iConf, Flds
Set iMsg = CreateObject(“CDO.Message”)
Set iConf = CreateObject(“CDO.Configuration”)
Set Flds = iConf.Fields

‘ SMTP server configuration.
With Flds
.Item(cdoSendUsingMethod) = cdoSendUsingPort

‘ Set the SMTP server address here.
.Item(cdoSMTPServer) = oMyIP
.Update
End With

‘ Set the message properties.
With iMsg
Set .Configuration = iConf
.To = oTo
.From = oName & “@” & oDomain
.Subject = “Backup Copy to Offsite Drive Started”
.TextBody = “The NTVI Server Backup copying is now taking place. The drive should be ready to remove offsite.”
End With

‘ An attachment can be included.
‘iMsg.AddAttachment Attachment

‘Send the message.
iMsg.Send

Thats it, You can download a zipped copy of the entire script using the above link.

I hope this helps you, Enjoy..

Cubert