Exchange 2010 Activesync Issue

I upgraded my Exchange server from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 as part of the migration to SBS 2011. After the upgrade I was making good progress ironing out issues until I tried to sync my android phone.

The native android email in Android 2.2 was failing with an unspecified error. I then tried Touchdown by Nitrodesk. It was also failing but they have nice logging built into their software and I was able to see the following:


Checking Certificate...
Checking ActiveSync with SSL...
Server is Microsoft-IIS/7.5
ActiveSync was found
ActiveSync Version :Versions:Microsoft-IIS/7.5,2.0,2.1,2.5,12.0,12.1,14.0,14.1
Trying activesync protocol -116...
ActiveSync provisioning returns HTTP:200
Error provisioning ActiveSync: Policy status is 0
Trying activesync protocol 2.5...
ActiveSync provisioning returns HTTP:200
ActiveSync provisioning success
The following policies have been requested :

Refreshing AS folders
Error refreshing folders

Checking 2007 with SSL...

 The error refreshing folders was the key and NitroDesk support pointed me to the Nick MacKechnie blog. The main idea is that there is an issue with upgrading to Exchange 2010 and some of the permissions are not set correctly.

Another good Exchange troubleshooting tool I found is the Microsoft Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer . This tool pointed right to the HTTP 500 error I was getting which pointed me to a Technet Article that described essentially the same issue.

I followed the steps but in my case I had about 10 Exchange server entries so I selected the first one and chose "include inheritable permissions from parent". After the obligatory  OK clicks I ran the Exchange checker again and it passed. Then I tried my Droid in both Touchdown and the Native app and everything worked.

Adobe Reader X Strikes Again

On my Windows machine I use TeXnic Control Center to write and compile my Latex documents.
One of the many features I like is one click compiling of the Latex and it opens up the pdf so I can take a look.

The upgrade new version of Adobe Reader X caused this functionality to stop working. Adobe reader would open but not my document and then after a bit an error window would pop up.

After a bit of searching it appears that Adobe decided to break backward compatibility and change the DDE commands. To make Texnic work again I had to make some changes.

First in Texnic go to the build menu, Define Output Profiles and select LaTeX => PDF.
Then select the viewer tab and change each of the server names from acroview to AcroviewR10.

In one of the posts on the Adobe Forum an adobe rep stated that not only did they change it on purpose but they intend to change the version number with each new adobe version i.e. AcroviewR11.

Now to solve the second part of the problem you will need to go into the Adobe settings and disable the protected mode on startup.

These changes got me back up and running so that I could continue writing my paper. Lesson learned, do not upgrade any software when you are in the middle of writing a paper.

Syslog to MySQL

I had a need to put Syslog data into a database for further analysis.
Using one of my linux boxes this turned out to be much easier than I thought, at least for basic functionality.

Basically I followed the instructions at http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_mysql.html
 and everything just worked.

I already had MySQL installed and Rsyslog was the default syslog on my Linux distribution so I used the included script to create the database, then I created the account.

mysql -u root -p < /usr/share/doc/rsyslog-mysql/createDB.sql

grant all privileges on Syslog.* to 'Syslog'@'%' identified by 'password' with grant option;

Then I modified the rsyslog config file.

#put this line as the first line in /etc/rsyslog.conf
$ModLoad ommysql

#this line logs everything
*.*       :ommysql:127.0.0.1,Syslog,Syslog,password
#*.*       :ommysql:127.0.0.1,db-name,db-user,db-password

Then I restarted the Rsyslog process.
/etc/rc.d/init.d/rsyslogd restart

Then I issued a 'SELECT * FROM Syslog.SystemEvents;'


I saw that the local machine was logging all of its syslog data and the other devices that were logging to the syslog server were also showing up in the database. As a point of interest, all of the data was still being put in the regular syslog file as well.

Future work on this will be to tailor what gets logged and some possible customizations.

Create an Animated Gif with ImageMagick

I needed to create an animated series of images to observe some change over time.
To do this I decided to use ImageMagick on my linux machine. I save all of the images in a folder named image1.png, image2.png, image3.png, ... .

Then I used the following command.

convert -verbose -delay 200 -loop 0 image*.png output.gif

This takes the files named image*.png in the order that they are listed and makes a GIF out of them with a 200 hundreths of a second delay between each frame. The -loop 0 flag makes it loop indefinitely. You can put 4 in there to loop 4 times etc.

This worked fine but the order was not correct when I got over 10 images so for now I renamed them to imageA.png and went from there.

That solved my immediate need for an animated image but I need to find a neater solution to sorting the filenames.

Small Business Server 2008 Router Port Mapping

Recently my Small Business Server 2008 machine started complaining about not being able to open the router ports. I think it happened when I ran the Fix My Network Wizard to update the expiring certificates.

At some point in the past year I must have enabled uPnP on the router interface. When the wizard detects the uPnP it tries to configure the router and since it could not it was giving me error messages.

I spent a few hours trying to find some documentation on the wizard and/or figure it out. ONe of the closest places with good info was http://sbs.seandaniel.com/2008/10/fix-my-network-wizard-in-sbs-2008.html.

In the end I just turned off uPnP and reran the wizard and the errors went away.

Firefox Out of Process Config

I have run into a problem with Firefox when viewing a pdf. The pdf would not finish downloading or take a long time and it would lock up the entire browser. I couldn't switch to another tab or do anything. For some reason this seemed to happen very often when reading academic papers found on Google Scholar.

Since 3.6.4 Firefox has had the option of having a plugin run in another process. It is part of the Electrolysis project. By default  QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight on their own process, but you can also manually add other plugins via about:config.

I wanted to add Adobe reader to see if this would help and this is how I did it.

Open about:config

right click and create a new boolean preference

name it dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nppdf32.dll

set the boolean value to True


Restart the browser for the settings to take effect. This setting can be reversed by changing the boolean value to False.


For other plugins you can create by adding the plugin name. Those name can be found in about:plugin.

Turn of Snap in Windows 7

I am not crazy about the Snap feature in Windows 7.
The Snap feature allows you to arrange open windows, including maximizing and resizing, just by dragging and dropping a window to different edges of the screen.

To disable it click on the start button and type snap in the start search box.
A window that looks like this will open.

Click on "Prevent Windows from being ...." and then ok.

Now you should be able to move the windows and place them where you like.