Lync 2010 forgetting contacts

I have a problem with Lync 2010 on Windows 7 SP1 with Office 2010. Excahnge 2007
It is reproducible across other machines in the organisation on both Outlook 2007 and 2010.
The problem is as follows:

Create a contact with an email address and phone number in your personal contacts in Outlook

Then switch to Lync and search for the contact and add them

As you can see the contact is added with all information present.

Logout of Lync and back in, Lync will then try to sync contacts with Outlook (shown by updating…)

After a while the sync finishes but the contacts do not have the details left in them to be able to phone the contact. Sort of defeats the point of adding it in the first place.

Sophos Install on Vista/W7

Have recently upgraded to Sophos Enterprise Manager 4.5

Still didn't seem to be a way to push the install to the more modern of the Microsoft Windows family so had to work out how to script it.

I could see the PC's that were not showing up as connected in the Enterprise manager and hacked together this script:

e:\pstools\psexec.exe \\ComputerToInstallTo -u Domain\Adminitrator -p Password -h -i \\SophosServer\SophosUpdate\CIDs\S000\SAVSCFXP\setup.exe -mng Yes -crt R -user Domain\Administrator -pwd Password -s yes -ni yes

The PC that you are trying to push Sophos to needs to be logged on but only as a standard user

For information about the above check out these two help pages:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/12570.html

An Alarming Time (or Facebook stalking works out)

I live beside a Gardman warehouse, the one that is mentioned in this press release.

For some reason the alarm at the building was triggered between the end of 2010 and the start of 2011 (Saturday), being a good neighbour I wandered down to the sign saying who looked after the building to see if they were aware.



On phoning the local security company (GSL Darden) they informed me the key holder had been contacted but he was in Essex and it would be a while before he turned up.

A second night of the alarm sounding went by and (now Sunday) I again phoned GSL who told me that the key holder had decided to stay in Essex until late Monday probably Tuesday.

Humm – that’s a bit of a pain as this alarm is getting slightly annoying now. So what to do?

1. I rang all the numbers I could find on the Gardman website (http://www.gardman.co.uk/contact-us) and got either no reply or automated “thanks for calling but we are closed”
2. Searched Twitter for an account -Found @gardman but don’t think that Keith Lee is the guy I need!
3. Did a bit of digging for directors names and came up with:

• Mark Pearson (CEO)
• Tim Stainton (Commercial Director)
  

Thought about buying the financial reports online from Companies House to get home details (did that before to get them for First Choice when they gave poor customer service) but didn’t want to spend the money.

So where to turn next...... FACEBOOK :-)

So, lets start at the top – Mark Pearson, I found this profile : http://www.facebook.com/mark.d.pearson who is friends with a Tim Stainton but not sure its the CEO

On to Tim – he was easier to find as he has a nice clear photo http://www.facebook.com/tim.stainton and reading down from his (unsecured) wall there is this comment about B&Q.



When you refer to http://www.diyweek.net/news/news.asp?id=12511 you can see that Tim came from B&Q in the past and he also has a boat http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=226355&id=777438972

so I’m thinking reasonably successful guy with the same name – probably a match.

It's time to craft a message to him:

Hi Tim,

Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday but myself and my family have been disturbed by one of the security alarms on your new West Lynn site since New Years Day. The site is the one this press release is about : http://www.gardman.co.uk/gardman-ready-growth

I phoned the local security company, who tell me that the key holder has been informed but wont be back until late Monday or probably Tuesday when the site re-opens.

I think this is a tad antisocial and would appreciate if you would please get someone to site earlier to firstly turn off the alarm and secondly for your peace of mind ensure that the site and products are secure.

With kindest regards Tobie Fysh

I’ll post any response that I get.

Chrome is eating my session varibles (or how a Favicon saved the day)

Have had an interesting problem with the latest version of Google Chrome and a classic ASP site that I am responsible for.

The site uses session variables to control the authentication of logged in users. These are compared against a backend database to ensure that the logged in user is still authenticated while they move around the site.

I had a report from one of our external customers bemoaning the fact that we were not allowing Chrome to navigate the site, they could log in correctly and arrive on the landing page but as soon as they tried to move to any of the other authenticated pages they would be logged out.

I tried to replicate the problem on the internal test site but could not. Looking at it the differences between the two they were that the external site was secured (SSL Certificate) and being published through ISA 2006.

I created a new site (by copying the live site in IIS) and created a rule for access through the ISA server (purchasing certificate from Digicert - best certificate provider around).

AND IT WORKED. Wahoo, so the problem must be in the ISA Rule/IIS/Certificate (as these are the only things that are different).

I then spent the next day comparing the two sites (Live and Dev). Unfortunately I could find no differences at all. The rules in ISA are identical; the IIS settings are exactly the same. I rekeyed the SSL certificate so it was created from the same IIS configuration but I could not get the original site to work.

I started to look at the live site in more detail, the return code from the logout is a querystring that showed that the error was that the username or password was incorrect. I didn’t have a reason to put the site into maintenance and block customers out of the system as it was “only” Chrome users who were affected, therefore the debugging had to be done live. To do so I added a couple of lines to the ASP to show the variables:

if Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") = "MYEXTERNALIP" then
response.Write("." & Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") & "
" & session("Username") & "
" & session.SessionID)
end if

This showed that all was correct and the logouts were only happening after the next click within the site. I then had to put some error trapping into the head of the page so on the next click I could see what variables we had:

if objRS.eof = true then
objRs.Close
Set objRs = nothing
objConn.Close
Set objConn = nothing
if Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") = " MYEXTERNALIP " then
response.Redirect("/debugpage.asp")
else
response.Redirect("/index.asp?Error=2")
end if
end if

My debugpage.asp had the following in it:
response.Write("." & Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR") & "
" & session("Username") & "
" & session.SessionID)

Strangely the output on this had:
IPAddress
blankline
SessionID

So something was eating the session("Username") variable…..

Looking through the code there didn’t seem to be anything that would be removing the variable, I stepped through the code line by line on paper and could not see anything that would be removing the variable, the only sessions.abandon was in the logout, index landing page and the global.asa PLUS the other session variables were not getting cleared either (and this was getting away from the fact it was ONLY happening on Chrome).

I next fired up a test laptop and downloaded a copy of fiddler2. I put it onto a test laptop as I needed to decrypt and inspect HTTPS sessions, to do this in Fiddler2 you have to add a certificate to the local store and its recommended that you only ever install the HTTPS monitoring on a test machine.

Once I started to look at the output I saw the following:

This showed that there was a 302 response when trying to get to favicon.ico (line 91)……. Hummm, I don’t have a favicon so why was it redirecting?

AND HANG ON, what’s that on line 93? Why is the Secure URL turning up when I’m browsing the Dev site…… Suddenly a light bulb went off in my head. Scroll back to how I created the Dev site (hint ….. the IIS settings are exactly the same……).

The Dev site was a copy of the secure files, that includes the Web.config. Web.config contains the error page redirections:


So what was happening then?

1. Customer enters Dev site
2. Chrome (for some reason) demands favicon file
3. IIS can’t find favicon so issues a 302 redirect to a 404 page
4. Cusomised ASP page which includes the following code: session("Username ") = ""
5. As customer is on Dev site the session variable is NOT cleared (it’s the wrong domain) But if the user is on the Secure site then the code will execute correctly and clear the variable.

So, what the hell does this all mean?
For some reason the latest version of Chrome insists on trying to download favicon.ico, as this doesn’t exist a 404 is generated on the server and *if* you have some code to trap 404’s then it will execute.

The lesson:
When copying websites carefully look at your web.config and put a favicon.ico on the root of your websites so that Chrome doesn’t put a whole load of 404’s into your weblogs (or worse stops the customers from using your site).

Global Address List not up to date

First Check Outlook Web Access as this will always be up to date. If the staff members are missing from OWA then this is a different problem.



If the staff members are in OWA try a manual download

Outlook > Tools > Send/Receive > Download Address Book

Uncheck Download changes since last Send/Receive > OK



If this fails then repair the Outlook Profile:

Outlook > Account Settings > repair > Next

If the wizard reports that Outlook need to be restarted then restart Outlook and retry the manual download above



If the manual download fails start Services.msc (elevated/run as end user is logged in)

Check that:



* Automatic Updates

* Background Intelligent transfer Service



are both set to Automatic and are started.

If not, make those changes.



Return to Outlook and try the manual download again.

Dynamic Distribution Group – Opposites are good too!

Have hit an interesting error in Exchange 2007.

We have a Dynamic Distribution Group (DDG)that sends to all staff (Lets call is “Email All Staff”).

Originally the script was as follows:

Set-DynamicDistributionGroup "Email All Staff" -RecipientFilter{ Company -eq "Our Company Name" } –RecipientContainer "AD.Root.Node"

Which took everyone who had an email address and sent the email to them

When users leave our employment we change their account password and hide them from our address list before deleting them, the rational being that we can then share the mailbox to someone to dredge through for anything important and they can monitor any external email for the 1st month after they leave.

The problem is that any email that gets sent to the “Email All Staff” DDG gets evaluated and sent to the hidden users too.

Ahhh I though, if I have the script do the following:

Set-DynamicDistributionGroup "Email All Staff" -RecipientFilter{ -not(HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled -eq $false) -and(Company -eq "Our Company Name" )} –RecipientContainer "AD.Root.Node"

then it will only send to mailboxes that have not got the hidden attribute set.

I was thus happy that I’d solved a little problem and would help our end users by them not getting additional email that was not relevant.



A support call drops into my queue say that an email to “Email All Staff” has not been delivered to any recipients.

Humm, lets investigate

Looking at the properties of the DDG (Exchange Management Console > Recipient Configuration > Distribution Group > Open “Email All Staff” > Filter Tab > Preview)



You can see all the mailboxes who don’t have the “Hide from Exchange address lists” checked are shown.

So all seems fine with the DDG so lets investigate the email.

I fire up the Exchange Message Tracking tool (Exchange Management Console > Toolbox > Message Tracking) and drill down to the message.



Looking at the screen shot above you can see that the email expanded and delivered to only three recipients – “Richard, Ann and Simon”

Looking at the properties of these mailboxes you can see that they are all Hidden from the address book – The exact opposite of what the script and the Exchange Management Console says……



After 3 hours on the phone Microsoft want use to upgrade to the latest Service Pack and retest. I’ll update when I have more information……

Free iPhone game from RBS

Ahhh RBS, Royal Bank of Scotland. How us tax payers loved bailing you out so it's nice to see you repaying some of this love by giving away free iPhone games.



Yea, I know. Free iPhone games.

Emma for some reason wanted to download Wheres Wally from the iPhone. She still wanted it after seeing that it would cost a whole 59 pence. What can I say. She likes hunting for the little guy (!)

So she pays her money and takes her choice.

Around a month later her credit card statement turns up from RBS. The only purchase that month was against her iTunes account and underneath it a credit line of 59 pence with the title "small balance write off". So thanks tax pagers of England. You have paid for Em's purchase. Next month we are going to see if they will do the same for a 99 pence game.......