Exchange 201o0 Update Rollups and Error 1603

You download and begin to install an Exchange Rollup Update only to find after waiting ages for it do the NGen stuff it fails, and on watching it closely you notice it fails on stopping services.

In the event log you are pointed at a website with information on verbose logging for MSI installations.

But you can forget that – the fix is easy! Start and administrative command prompt and run the rollup update from the command line! It will work first time (as long as the update msi file is actually copied to the local machine, it will typically not run from a copy on a network drive.

.DLL Errors and Blackberry Enterprise Server

During a configuration of Blackberry Enterprise Server today I found that I was getting .DLL errors when trying to create a MAPI profile on the BES Server (v5.0.2) when running IEMSTest.

Well it was not the usual stuff – it ended up being the alias that had been assigned to the BESAdmin account. The policy at the company where I am installing Exchange 2010 is last_first@domain.com, but the BESAdmin account does not have a first or last name and so got an email address of _9c73@domain.com, and so though I could login in OWA, I could not do a MAPI login (IEMSTest or Outlook – because the alias was not BESAdmin as they default to).

Once I changed the SMTP Address to BESAdmin@domain.com then it all worked fine.

Random Chinese Characters in Exchange 2010 SP1 Emails

I have been sent a few emails from a client that start like this:

格tml> 格ead> 猼tyle㰾!-- .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Tahoma } -->⼼style> ⼼head> 㰊body class='hmmessage'>

The HTML characters repeat throughout the message, but not on every message, though those sent from Hotmail are typically affected (but it is not always Hotmail).

The problem is due to the email having character encoding in the charset META tag that differs from the character encoding in the MIME part and a HTML disclaimer having been added. When Exchange 2010 SP1 adds the HTML disclaimer it re-encodes the message and this results in a corrupt message because the wrong character set information is read.

The fix for this has been documented in KB969129, which refers to Exchange 2007, but the same fix is true for Exchange 2010 SP1.

The fix is to add the DisableDetectEncodingFromMetaTag attribute to EdgeTransport.exe.config. This file can be found at \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\bin and can be opened in Notepad. Make a backup of the file before you change it and then add to the <appsettings> area of the file the following

<add key="DisableDetectEncodingFromMetaTag" value="true" />

After you save the config file you need to restart the Microsoft Exchange Transport service for the setting to take effect.

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!

iPhone 4 and Exchange 2003/2010 ActiveSync Slow Performance

This is a well known problem now, and has been since the first releases of the iPhone 4 in July 2010. Later updates to iOS (4.1 and later) do not exhibit this problem, but if you are upgrading an Exchange 2003 organization to Exchange 2010 there comes a point where you switch over the endpoints that the users connect to. Its at this switchover that you will experience performance issues if there are any unpatches iPhones in your user population. But, and here is the catch, as you have yet to migrate these users to Exchange 2010 you cannot use the Allow/Block/Quarantine feature (ABQ) of Exchange 2010 to restrict the phones access attempts.

The phones will connect to Exchange 2010 and be proxied to Exchange 2003 and the performance issues will set in. So how do you stop the phones at Exchange 2010?

You use a feature of IIS instead, you can block query string values in the Request Filtering feature of IIS 7.5 (or installable add-on for IIS 7.0).

Add the following to the web.config in c:\inetpub\wwwroot to globally block iPhones, and once you have a list of bad specific devices you can expand this list some more.

<system.webServer>
  <security>
    <requestFiltering>
      <denyQueryStringSequences>
        <add sequence="DeviceType=iPhone" />
      </denyQueryStringSequences>
    </requestFiltering>
  </security>
</system.webServer>