SSL Certificate error when manage Exchange 2k3 Public Folders

Written by Peter Molnar
Today’s life-saver trick came from Jim McBee. Jim is an Exchange MVP (as far as I know),   and has a great blog about (Mostly) Exchange.

Let’s see the situation,that I faced today: My former colleague pleased me to help about server issues, which is very annoying, and they have no more idea left. (Actually this situation called as 2nd Level Support;)). So they could not access to Public Folder management through the Exchange System Management console. The error message was:

The SSL certificate server name is incorrect.
ID no: c103b404 

I jumped into the investigation. They are using Self Signed certificates, which is good enough in this situation, the partner is a small-sized business. Furthermore, they have  more than one domain name, and they can use any of the names to get access to the Outlook Web Access! When I started playing with certificates for these domain names, I had another error:

The token supplied to the function is invalid
ID no 80090308

Without a luck, and after 1 hour of playing with trying Microsoft solutions, described in Knowledge Base 324345: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324345 and Technet, in a discussion about migrating server with same errors I found the Holy Grail, in Jim’s blog and in the ADSIEDIT, and removing only one parameter from Exchange Configuration.

Check out Jim’s solution which is working.

Thank you, Jim!

Installing Exchange Server 2010 on Windows Server 8 Beta

Written by Peter Molnar
Obviously, that Microsoft head to cloud based solutions in their recently released operating systems, Windows 8 and Windows Server 8. After the leap-year downtime in Azure administrators and IT Managers – like me too – still want to keep some services in-house. However, Windows Server 8 Beta is not supporting Exchange Server 2010, there is a quite simple way to install it.

In order to get the impossible, unsupported and undocumented service working, the brave system engineer, like Paul Cunningham starts to hack Exchange Server 2010 to Windows Server 8 Beta. And succeeded.

Check out his how to: Installing Exchange Server 2010 on Windows Server 8 Beta

3D with HTML5 and CSS3 spreading around the web

Written by Peter Molnar
Do you remember, when the hologram message of Princess Leila popped out from R2-D2 in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s house?

OK, we haven’t been moved so fast, but recently the usage of 3D technology is increasing. I found these new results around the net, both of them thought-provoking idea.

First is the usage of 3D on web pages, based on CSS3 and HTML5. I remember the 90′s, when an animated gif had a WOW effect. Acko has a great design, with amazing 3D perspective: http://acko.net/

Another very interesting experiment connected to Microsoft Kinect. George MacKerron made a fascinating project, based on HTML5 and WebGL, called depthcam. When I saw it first time I felt like Obi-Wan… When he was young, and a startup company released first beta version of Hologram Messaging System, somewhere in the Galaxy….

 

WordPress max memory limit issue

Written by Peter Molnar
My logcheck agent sent me strange errors in a WordPress site:

ALERT – script tried to increase memory_limit to 268435456 bytes which is above the allowed value.

It claims that wp-admin/admin.php wanted to increase php memory_limit directive. Apparently, the guys at WordPress decided, that one instance of WordPress greatest demand is 256M RAM. It is a bit more than I have ever allowed to a php script.

Workaround: Check your /wp-includes/default-constats.php file for define( ‘WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’256M’ ). Edit the value corresponding your server configuration.

I assume, that problem will back on WordPress update.

Cloud Storage – The race has begun

Written by Peter Molnar
Cloud-based storage race has begun. As I can see, it was obvious, because of two reasons: almost every service could be served from the cloud, only storage was missing. The other one is: tablets and smartphones (and ultra-notebooks) has no enough storage, but they are getting better in communication and data transfer (i.e. 802.11n and 802.11ac wifi and LTE). I am extremely curious about the cloud-based storage expansion in the business sector…

Article of thenextweb.com about the future competition of SkyDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox here->

Image resizer and cropping script – It saves your life!

Written by Peter Molnar
Have you ever stacked with huge number (and Gigs) of images on remote server in various orientation, that you have to resize and crop for thumbnail?

I have. And that script saved hours for me: http://joedesigns.com/v22/?page=scripts_widgets&id=67. With a small change the script could in-place crop and resize pictures for a special thumbnail based gallery (more than 4000 pics!). Especially when you have to arrange from an old-style gallery to a fancy sliding photo wall, by Manoela Ilic (http://tympanus.net/codrops/2010/05/14/sliding-panel-photo-wall-gallery-with-jquery), Joe’s script is crucial!

 

Outlook is endlessly loading profile

Written by Peter Molnar
I have a weird issue in last November, with a recently installed notebook, Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010 on it. It had worked few days, when one day the user called us with the following details:

Symptom: Outlook could start, but it was waiting at Loading profile.

Actions has taken by me:

  • Scandisk -> nope.
  • Scanpst -> nope.
  • Deleted Outlook local files -> nope.
  • Started Outlook in safe mode -> nope.
  • Deleted Exchange Account, set up as POP3 account ->WORKED! But we want Exchange account!
  • Set up Exchange Account again -> nope.
  • [head scratching -> nope]
  • Tried to repair Office -> Setup can not repair Office!
  • Remove Office -> Setup can not remove Office (OMG)!

The last action was a surprise indeed!

The last point highlighted the real problem: somehow Windows Installer not worked properly.

Next question: How to reinstall Windows Installer on a Windows 7 machine? The right answer: there is no installer package for Windows Installer on Windows 7. Use the System File Checker (SFC) utility with /scannow switch…

Voila, it worked!