With a couple of clean installs of Backup Exec 12D/12.5, sometimes the selection list in Backup Exec shows no local or remote selections to choose from. One thing to check is the Remote Operators group which is a default group in SBS 2003, the Administrator account or whichever account you use for Backup Exec should not be in this group. Secondly, Backup Exec needs a group policy setting for the credentials that Backup Exec uses: add the Backup Exec user to the setting “Log on as a batch job” in the Default Domain Controllers Policy/Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Local Policies/User Rights Assignment/ Once you’ve added the Backup Exec user, go to Start –> Run –> and type “gpupdate /force” This will update Active Directory. Close and re-open Backup Exec, the selections should now be available.

You may have trouble sending mail to certain domains while using Exchange Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008. The Queue Viewer displays the following status error for the domain in question:

“451 4.4.0 primary target IP address responded with “421.4.4.2 unable to connect.”attempted failover to alternate host, but that did not succeed.Either there are no alternate hosts, or delivery failed to all alternate hosts.”

This problem occurs because routers do not support the TCP autotuning settings in Windows Server 2008.

To disable autotuning, follow these steps:

Run CMD as Administrator

At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

This command disables the Receive Window Auto-Tuning feature.

Exit the Command Prompt window.

Restart the computer.

To add the Active Directory Schema Admin for the mmc, you need to first register a dll before you can see the Schema Admin tools. Go to start –> run –> type: regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll and click enter. You can now open the mmc, and add Active Directory Schema.

In the situation I came across, Outlook 2007 clients were constantly prompting for a password eventhough the users were on the LAN, members of the domain, and logged in to the PC with domain credentials.  While I found several potential causes, the solution ended up being an SSL setting in IIS on the mail server. 

The solution was to allow client certificates on the virtual directory for Exchange Autodiscover.  It turns out the clients were attempting to use the Autodiscover service with Exchange 2007 to detect settings and the website wasn’t accepting their client certificate.  The client certificates are apparently used for encryption between the client and the server.  Disabling the checkbox to enable that type of communication may also have been a solution, but this is a better one because it maintains the security of an encrypted channel.  Here are the instructions:

1. Using IIS6 - Click Here
2. Using IIS7 - Open the IIS manager.  Expand the Sites group and expand down to the Autodiscover virtual directory.  Select this virtual directory then selec “SSL Settings” from the center pane.  In the settings window, select “Accept Client Certificates”.

In addition, the authentication settings on this virtual directory can also cause this to happen if not configured correctly.  Just make sure that Integrated Windows Authentication is checked.

After installing the latest version of Trend Micro Scanmail 8.0 on an SBS 2008 server, the Exchange Transport service kept stopping and reporting the following errors in the Application event log:

Event ID: 16023 Source: MSExchangeTransportMicrosoft Exchange couldn’t start transport agents. The Microsoft Exchange Transport service will be stopped. Exception details: Failed to create type ‘TrendMicro.SMEX.hookE12TransportAgent.hookE12RoutingAgentFactory’ from assembly ‘D:\Program Files\Trend Micro\Smex\hookE12TransportAgent.dll’ due to error ‘Invalid agent assembly path.’ …

Event ID: 1052 Source: MSExchange Extensibility

The creation of an agent factory for the agent ‘ScanMail Routing Agent’ failed with error ‘Failed to create type ‘TrendMicro.SMEX.hookE12TransportAgent.hookE12RoutingAgentFactory’ from assembly ‘D:\Program Files\Trend Micro\Smex\hookE12TransportAgent.dll’ due to error ‘Invalid agent assembly path.’.’. Verify that the corresponding transport agent assembly and dependencies with the correct version are installed.

The issues turned out to be a permission issue on the SMEX program file directory.  Exchange uses the Network Service account for the Transport Service credentials but this account didnt get security permissions to the Trend Micro SMEX program folder after install.  Adding the appropriate read permissions did the trick.

Often, we run across spyware that may disable registry editing.  When you try to access regedit, you may get the following prompt:

“Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator.”

There are several methods to re-enable the registry editing from this point.  First, the easiest is usually to run this command from the run command or from a command prompt:

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableRegistryTools /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

 Log off then back on and try again.  If that didn’t work, you can try the other steps below:

Use GPEDIT to modify the local security policy:

1. Click Start, Run
2. Type GPEDIT.MSC and Press Enter
3. Go to the following location
   • User Configuration
   • Administrative Templates
   • System
4. In the Settings Window, find the option for “Prevent Access to Registry Editing Tools” and double-click on it to change.
5. Select Disabled or Not Configured and choose OK
6. Close the Group Policy Editor and restart your computer
7. Try opening REGEDIT again

Download this VBS file:

www.dougknox.com/security/scripts_desc/regtools.htm

Links to sources for Terminal Server printing issues/fixes

Microsoft Technet - Configure settings for mapping client devices - link

Brian Madden - The Ultimate Guide to Terminal Server Printing - Design and Configuration - link

Brother Printers - Universal print drivers for Terminal Servers and Citrix - link

MS Terminal Services Blog - Windows Terminal Services Printing - link

Microsoft - Terminal Server Printer Redirection Wizard Tool - link

Microsoft - Choosing the right printer drivers - link

KTS - Terminal Server category - link

I recently experienced an issue where my Motorola Q9c from Verizon was hanging up for 1 - 2 minutes when I would try to unlock the screen.  Normally, you press the unlock soft key and the screen will display a prompt to press the * key to complete the unlock process.  With the problem I experienced, it was hanging before showing me that prompt and my phone would be unusable for about 1 - 2 minutes.  After this happened, I checked my task manager and found the “Text Messages” process consuming a good chunk of resources.  I forced this to quit and my phone would be fine until I wrote another text messsage and that process respawned. 

After trying a few things, I found that this issues was actually caused by the text prediction feature and the size of the text prediction history cache.  If you are having the same problem, try turning this feature off, or at least clearing the history.  Here’s how:

1. Select “Text Input Settings” from the main settings menu.
2. To Disable this feature, clear the “Suggest words when typing” option
3. To clear the history, access the menu by using the right soft key and select “Clear Input History”

I recently experienced a strange issue with a client where office documents from Word and Excel (.doc and .xls) would open very slowly when double clicked.  If you first opened the respective application and then selected the document from the open menu, it would open almost instantly.  After exhaustive research, I found the issue was related to the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) settings for those applications.  More on DDE can be found here.

The corrective action was to modify the “Application used to perform this action” string in the DDE settings.  Here it is step-by-step:

1. Open folder options from within the control panel.
2. Select the tab for file types.
3. From the list, select the document extension you are having trouble with (.doc or .xls)
4. Click the advanced button
5. Append the string “%1″ including the quotes to the end of the existing “Application used to perform this action” string.  If the existing string ends with a “/dde” remove that.
6. Click OK and try again.

With the newer versions of Backup Exec and Exchange 2007, Granular Recovery Technology (GRT), a requirement of the Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects needs to be downloaded and installed on the Exchange/Media server. Microsoft has updated the Mapi and CDO to 1.2.1 to include Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. 64bit servers have no problem installing.

Link to download.