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Created: 03 October 2013

Hits: 5922

If you are running RDS 2008 R2 you may find you receive a non descriptive error when you try to publish InfoPath 2010 in Design mode. This app uses a command line switch to start in "Design" mode.  When you publish the app via RemoteApp you will notice that the app will show that it has Arguments enabled.

This is the error message users will receive when they try to start the app:

A quick an easy fix is to use a VBScript to start Microsoft InfoPath.  The script below will do the trick:

Dim objShell
Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" )
   objShell.Run("""c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\INFOPATH.EXE"" /DESIGN"),1,False
Set objShell = Nothing

Save the above using notepad as start-inforpath-design.vbs.

Publish a new app and this time browse to the location where you saved the script and select it as the app.  Once published edit the security as usual and change the icon by browsing to the location of Info Path .exe.  You will also want to change the display name to Microsoft InfoPath 2010.

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Created: 23 June 2012

Hits: 3195

Exchange Autodiscover service is a very nice feature but you may run into issues with certificate errors or warnings if you don't have the URL's setup correctly.

For my lab environment I purchased an SSL Certificate for my public domain: mail.datawan.net. I decided to use a split DNS configuration where I would use the same URL for both internal and external access.  This allows me to use one certificate for both internal and external access. This certificate works perfectly for ActiveSync and OWA services.  But when setting up Outlook clients I always received an error about the certificate name not matching.  I started by first looking at the settings under:

Microsoft Exchange On-Premises > Server Configuration > Client Access

I made sure to update the same URL for all the tabs below by double clicking and setting the InternalURL and ExternalURL to the same setting.  For POP3 and IMAP4 just make sure that the URL for X.509 certificate name (under Authentication tab) is using the external URL.  See Figure 1:

After doing this I started Outlook 2010 and still received the error message.  After some searching around I found that there are a few other places where I would need to update the URL's but this time you have to use PowerShell.  Start up the Exchange Management Shell and take a look at the following settings:

Get-ClientAccessServer | fl identity, autodiscoverserviceinternaluri

Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory |fl identity,internalurl,externalurl

If you see the wrong URL in any of the output for InternalURL or ExternalURL you can fix it by using the following commands:

Set-ClientAccessServer -Identity EXCHSERVERNAME -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri https://mail.yourdomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml

Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory -Identity "EXCHSERVERNAME\EWS (Default Web Site)" -InternalUrl https://mail.yourdomain.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

There are other settings you could configure but the above settings should fix the certificate not matching on the name.  Keep in mind you will have to create a zone for your internal DNS servers for your external domain and point to internal IP Address for the services.

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Created: 20 May 2012

Hits: 3336

I don't think many Exchange 2010 Production environments will run into this issue but this may be helpful to someone running in Dev/Test environment where resources may be somewhat limited.

In Exchange 2007 and 2010 the Transport service monitors resources like disk space and memory.  If resources hit a specific threshold the service will stop receiving email.  You will be able to send email but not receive.  For example the default value for free disk space for queue database is 500MB.

You can find more information here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201658.aspx

The one thing I don't like is that when this happens event viewer is not always helpful and if you test connectivity using Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer the error makes it seem more like a disk space issue.  See image below.

In my case the memory use was at 92% on my Edge Transport server.  Since I run VM's it was a quick fix to add an additional 1GB memory.  Server booted up and email started to flow normally.  It took me a little while to figure out it was memory as the first thing I checked for was low disk space but I had over 20GB free on the data disk.  Email had also been flowing correctly for several months.  But once I thought to check memory usage it was clear the system needed more RAM.

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Created: 27 February 2012

Hits: 2440

The code below will let you store an encrypted password to disk for use in scripts.  The user used to create encrypted password must be the same user that will run the script.

Encrypt the password:

(Get-Credential).password | ConvertFrom-SecureString | set-content c:\scripts\cred.txt

The Encrypt password is now ready for use.  You can use it inside your code like this:

$user = 'domain\username'
$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PsCredential $user,(Get-Content C:\scripts\cred.txt | ConvertTo-SecureString)

If you want to include a clear txt password in your script you can use the method below:

$user = 'domain\username'
$password = ConvertTo-SecureString 'PlainTextPassword' -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PsCredential $user, $password