MCM Exchange 2010 Video Previews

Fame at last! Well not really, but here (http://blogs.technet.com/b/themasterblog/archive/2010/12/28/mcm-exchange-video-preview.aspx) is a video introducing the MCM Exchange class posted on the MCM Blog. The video is a 30 minute segment from the class without the interaction amongst the students that the class always has, and the reason for this lack of interaction is that it was recorded in the front room of my house.

Typically this content (the Header Firewall and Connector Permissions) could take one hour or more to cover when you include specific examples, a lab and all the different things to be aware of with regard to the subject.

GoDaddy SSL Certificate Approval with TXT Records

I had a bit of an issue with Go Daddy yesterday in that they took 5 days to approve a Subject Alternative Name change to a certificate, and as the usual route of adding a file to a website was unavailable to me I decided to prove ownership of the domain by the addition of a new TXT record to the domain.

Go Daddy’s instructions for doing this are only suitable for domains hosted at Go Daddy and there are no clear instructions for doing this if you do not use Go Daddy for your DNS hosting.

So how do you create an SSL approval with TXT record? You do it by creating a TXT record for a subzone. The subzone is DZC and the value of the record is the seven character string that Go Daddy sent you via email. For example dzc.domain.co.uk TXT AbCdEfG.

Once DNS has replicated to ALL of your DNS servers you can return to Go Daddy’s web form and approve your SSL certificate. You can check if all your DNS servers have your new data by using NSLookup or Dig, but preferred is the use of either of these two tools from an independent third party on the internet – for example www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php or www.dnssy.com/lookup.php.

Unknown Error, Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010

It’s a well documented issue with Outlook 2003 connecting to Exchange 2010 that means Outlook 2003 is not as responsive in Online mode as it was with legacy versions of Exchange Server (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2009942).

What is less well documented is an odd error message that can appear because of this interaction.

Imagine the following scenario. User on Outlook 2003 has lots of messages to delete, and deletes them one at a time. Outlook will not refresh the display for up to 5 seconds (the lowest setting that you can tell Outlook to refresh, via the Maximum Polling Frequency registry key). The problem is that if the user deletes a message and it does not disappear from the screen and then (thinking its gone, and the highlight has moved onto the next message) presses delete again. Outlook generates “Unknown Error” – which is not exactly helpful, and could appear as often as every other message that is deleted.

How to fix: Cached mode (though in the scenario I came across the above it was Outlook on a Terminal Server, so that’s not an option), upgrade the client version of Outlook, or use Shift or CTRL select and delete all your emails in one go!