After deploying a new Microsoft Exchange organization with Exchange 2016, or after deploying a Microsoft Exchange 2016 into an existing organization, you might notice a strange behaviour regarding the Offline Address Books (OAB).
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-OfflineAddressBook Name Versions AddressLists ---- -------- ------------ Standard-Offlineadressliste {Version2, Version3, Version4} {\Globale Standardadressliste} Standard-Offlineadressliste (Ex2013) {Version4} {\Globale Standardadressliste} Huh?! Where does this Exchange 2013 OAB come from? As you can see in the cmdlet output, there’s no Exchange 2013 in this organization.
Another bug in Exchange 2016 CU2. The Role of a new receive connector is greyed out. You can select “Front-End-Transport”. This is a screenshot from a german Exchange 2016 CU2.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Solution Use the Exchange Management Shell to create a new receive connector. Afterwards, you can modify it with the Exchange Control Panel (ECP).
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>New-Receiveconnector -Name "Client Frontend Dummy" -RemoteIPRange ("192.168.200.99") -TransportRo le "FrontendTransport" -Bindings ("0.
Sometimes it’s necessary to have two DNS servers that are authoritative for the same DNS namespace. This is the case if you use the same namespace for your web site and your internal Active Directory domain, e.g. terlisten-consulting.de. Or that you have created the zone terlisten-consulting.de in your Windows DNS to point specific hosts to internal IP addresses. The DNS servers at your ISP would be authoritative, and the domain controllers of your Active Directory would also be authoritative for the same domain.
As any other environment, my lab needs some maintenance from time to time. I use a Windows 2012 R2 VM with the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) role to keep my Windows VMs up to date. Like many others, I was surprised by KB3148812 (Update enables ESD decryption provision in WSUS in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2), which broke my WSUS. But the fix was easy: Uninstall KB3148812 and reboot the server.
Last week, I was surprisingly booked by a customer who observed a problem in his network. Unfortunately, colleagues worked on this network some day before (moving servers, routers etc. to a new pair of HP 7509 new core switches).
It was quickly clear, that some of the clients have received the wrong DNS servers from the DHCP server. The environment is a bit unusual. The customer is running two Active Directory domains (root and sub domain) in a single layer 2 broadcast domain.
A load balancer is an integral component of (nearly) every VMware Horizon View design. Not only to distribute the connections among a number of connection or security servers, but also to provide high availability in case of a connection or security server failure. Without a load balancer, connection attempts will fail, if a connection or security server isn’t available. Craig Kilborn wrote an excellent article about the different possible designs of load balancing.
Generating a certificate signing request (CSR) is the first step towards a signed certificate. The requests is generated with the applicants private key and consists of the public key, a name and optional attributes.
To generate a CSR, you can use tools like OpenSSL on a Linux box, or sometimes the application itself can generate a CSR. But if you have a Windows box, you don’t have OpenSSL by default. And it’s unhandy to install something just for a single CSR.
Some day ago, I installed a new Exchange 2013 CU11 for some test ins my lab. Nothing fancy, just a single server deployment on a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM. I deployed this Windows Server from a template, which was updated with the latest Windows Patches and WMF some days ago. The Exchange setup went smooth. I updated the SSL certificates and the internal and external URLs for the virtual directories.
Shrinking a big database on a Microsoft SQL Server can take some time. And it’s one of those tasks, where you wont get a status until it’s finished. I really hate this… But this small T-SQL query can help:
SELECT percent_complete, dateadd(second,estimated_completion_time/ 1000, getdate()) as est_completion_time FROM sys.dm_exec_requests WHERE command = 'DbccFilesCompact' Simply open a new query windows, paste the query into the query windows and execute the query. The query outputs the progress in percent and the estimated completion time.
In January 2014 I wrote a blog post about network flooding because of Windows NLB clusters in unicast mode. Yesterday, Windows NLB, HP switches and I met again.
After moving a customers core network from HP 5400zl switches to two IRF stacks with HP 7506 switches, multiple Windows NLB clusters stopped working. Because the Windows NLB used multicast operation mode, it was instantly clear that the switches were the problem.
