With the release of Mac OS 10.6 (aka “Snow Leopard”), Apple has incorporated the ability to connect the Mail, iCal, and Address Book apps natively with Exchange 2007. Unfortunately, support for this is NOT available for Exchange 2003 servers. Here’s how to set up Apple Mail:
- Open the Mail app.
- From the Mail menu, select Preferences (or press Apple-; to open Preferences).
- Select the Accounts tab in the Preferences window.
- Click the Add button (the “+” button in the lower left corner of the Accounts window).
- Enter the Full Name, Email Address, and Password for the Exchange account (NOTE: the e-mail address needs to match the default e-mail address on the Exchange account. In other words, if your outbound e-mail shows your address as Jonathan.Dough@smallbizco.net, then enter it exactly that way. Entering it as jonathan.dough@smallbizco.net may cause problems) and click Continue.
- If your Exchange server is correct set up for Autodiscover, the server will be found and automatic configuration will be attempted. Also, if your mail server is using a private SSL certificate, you may see one or more prompts about not being able to identify the server. If you have concerns, contact the team responsible for your mail server. Otherwise, click Continue or Connect if you see these prompts, but understand that you may be putting some account information at risk by doing so.
- If your e-mail address does not match your login name (i.e., the address is Jonathan.Dough@smallbizco.net, but the login is jonathandough), you will be prompted to enter your login credentials. Change the username to match the username you use to sign into Outlook Web Access, then click Continue.
- Once the account setup has confirmed the connection to the server, you will be prompted to set up your Address Book contacts and iCal calendars. Uncheck these boxes if you do not want to synchronize your iCal calendars with your Exchange calendars or your Address Book contacts with your Exchange contacts. Click Create when finished.
- Close the Accounts window when complete.
Now you will see a set of mail folders for your Exchange account under the Mailboxes section of Apple Mail. It may take some time for the folders to synchronize if you have quite a bit of mail on the server.
NOTE 1: When setting up Apple Mail to communicate with your Exchange 2007 server in this way, you are working directly with the information that is on the server, NOT on a local copy that has been downloaded on your Mac. That means that if you delete an e-mail from Apple Mail, it is immediately deleted from the server and will NOT be available to any other mail clients you may be using to access the information on your Exchange server (i.e., Outlook on a PC or a mobild phone that has native Exchange connectivity).
NOTE 2: If you have done an in-place upgrade from a previous version of Mac OS 10 to 10.6, there is a change that iCal may not be able to synchronize with the Exchange server. I have run into this issue and have not yet been able to find a solution, but others have not encountered this problem, so it’s unclear what the exact cause is at this point.
Connecting iPhone 3.x to Exchange
By · CommentsI originally posted instructions for configuring an iPhone 2.0 device to an Exchange server back when the iPhone 3G was originally released. While those instructions still hold for the most part, the iPhone interface has changed somewhat, so here’s an updated post with pics for connecting the iPhone 3.x OS to an Exchange server.
- From the Home screen (unless you’ve relocated the icon) open the Settings app.
- Click the Mail, Contacts, Calendars item in the list.
- Click Add Account.
- Click Microsoft Exchange at the top of the list.
- Enter your e-mail account information.
For the Email field, enter your default e-mail address exactly as it appears on your outgoing messages. This is important: if your outgoing e-mail address is Jon.Dough@smallbizco.net, you must match it exactly. If you enter jon.dough@smallbizco.net, you may encounter issues with calendar items. You may not need to enter the Domain field, but do enter it if you know what it is. Your username and password should match what you enter to access Outlook Web Access or your network account. If you do not know this information, you will need to get it from your system administrator. - Once you have entered the account information, click Next. The iPhone will attempt to connect to your mail server. You may be prompted to enter the name of the mail server if it could not be found automatically. This is the same as the server you use to access Outlook Web Access. If your Outlook Web Access server is https://remote.smallbizco.net/owa, then you need to enter remote.smallbizco.net as the mail server. Then click Next.
- If the iPhone cannot correctly validate the security certificate on your mail server (this may be the case if your Exchange server is running on Small Business Server 2003 or 2008), you will be asked what to do about the connection. If you know you have entered the correct information about your mail server, click Accept. If not, click Cancel.
- Choose which items from the Exchange server you want to sync with your iPhone. If you already have your contacts or calendar synchronizing with another source, you may want to hold off on selecting those to avoid a potential loss of data.
- Click Done when finished.
The iPhone will now start the initial connection to the Exchange server and synchronize the selected information.
More Fun with SBS 2008 and Sharepoint Updates
By · CommentsAnyone who has been dealing with SBS 2008 for the last couple of months knows that there have been issues with recent Sharepoint and SBS 2008 updates:
Companyweb Inaccessible After Sharepoint 3.0 Service Pack 2
Files in Companyweb are Opening Read-Only After SBS 2008 UR2
Sharepoint Service 3 Search event errors after an SBS 2008 Update Rollup
Event 2436 for Sharepoint Services 3 Search
Bottom line, it’s not been an easy road. Fortunately, the SBS team have done a good job of documenting the issues as they come up. Unfortunately, not everything has been caught yet. As I found out this week.
I’ve had two new SBS 2008 deployments in the last two months. One a migration (won’t go there), and the other a clean install. Ironically, the clean install is the one that’s caused me the most grief. The initial install went smoothly, and we’ve been keeping up to date with all the updates. Based on the information above, we knew to install the Sharepoint 3 SP2 before installing SBS 2008 UR2, and flipped the database off of Read Only.
Yesterday, I went to create a new security group. I launched the Add Group Wizard from the SBS 2008 console and was immediately greeted with:
“Windows SBS 2008 Add Group Wizard has stopped working”
The first wizard screen never even launched. Of course, I started digging through the addgroup.log file in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs, and found the following after hunting for several minutes:
An exception of type 'Type: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException, System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' has occurred. Message: Access to table dbo.Versions is blocked because the signature is not valid.
In the stack dump that followed, many of the references were to Sharepoint. “Ah ha!” I thought. “The Add Group Wizard also does some things in Sharepoint!” and I went off to look at Sharepoint. Sure enough, companyweb wouldn’t come up. So, I went back to Companyweb Inaccessible After Sharepoint 3.0 Service Pack 2 and went through those steps again. I verified that the database was not read-only, then I went through and followed the steps to re-run the setup wizard from the command line. Uh, oh, got errors. Fortunately, the psconfig command had me look at the PSCDiagnostics log in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS. Unfortunately, those logs didn’t really tell me anything useful. What I found was this:
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 ERR One or more configuration tasks has failed to execute
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 INF Entering function TaskDriver.Stop
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 INF Entering function StringResourceManager.GetResourceString
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 INF Resource id to be retrieved is PostSetupConfigurationFailedEventLog for language English (United States)
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 INF Resource retrieved id PostSetupConfigurationFailedEventLog is Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed. Configuration must be performed in order for this product to operate properly. To diagnose the problem, review the extended error information located at {0}, fix the problem, and run this configuration wizard again.
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 INF Leaving function StringResourceManager.GetResourceString
08/17/2009 17:12:59 1 ERR Configuration of SharePoint Products and Technologies failed. Configuration must be performed in order for this product to operate properly. To diagnose the problem, review the extended error information located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS\PSCDiagnostics_8_17_2009_17_7_9_507_298886299.log, fix the problem, and run this configuration wizard again.
I actually found a reference to the solution in the comments in the Companyweb Inaccessible After Sharepoint 3.0 Service Pack 2 post. Not directly, but one of the comments mentions that an account name was changed after the initial setup. I haven’t renamed any accounts, but I was reminded that I was running the psconfig command under a different account than had been used to initially install the Sharepoint SP2 update. I logged out of that account and logged back in with the account that was used to install the update, and the psconfig command completed successfully.
Woo hoo! Got it working! Only, http://companyweb and the Sharepoint Central Administration 3.0 sites still would not come up. I once again connected to the database via SQL Management Studio (reminder: run that with elevated permissions or you’ll never authenticate successfully) and verified that it was not read only. And the services were running. I checked the web site configuration in IIS and found the issue – all of the web sites had stopped. That’s when I remembered getting all the alerts overnight about the World Wide Web Publishing Service and the TS Gateway service being stopped. I had started them again first thing this morning and promptly forgot about them. Sure enough, when I checked again, they were both stopped (not surprised that the TS Gateway service stopped since it’s dependent upon the WWW Publishing service). I started both services and both companyweb and Sharepoint Central Administration were back online.
And I was able to finally add the one security group I needed to get added.
Takeaways from this process that aren’t documented in the SBS blog posts:
- If the Sharepoint SP2 update doesn’t take the first time and you need to run the psconfig command manually to complete the install, make sure you are running the command from the same user account that was used to attempt to install SP2 in the first place.
- Note that the psconfig command stops the World Wide Web Publishing Service (and TS Gateway) and does NOT restart them automatically.
Entourage for Exchange Web Services Released
By · CommentsToday, Microsoft released an update to the Office 2008 suite that allows Entourage (the Exchange e-mail client) to connect to Exchange 2007 servers using Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV. This update provides improvements in the calendar interface and allows Entourage to sync tasks, notes, and categories with Exchange server. While Entourage still lags terribly behind Outlook 2001 for Mac in terms of feature compatability with Exchange server, this update provides a much-awaited set of improvements for the Mac e-mail client.
Entourage 2008 Web Services edition requires Office 2008 with the 12.2.1 update installed. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not make the updates for Office for Mac cumulative, so if you install Office 2008 from the original media, you must first install Office 2008 SP1, then Office 2008 SP2, then the 12.2.1 Update before you will be able to install Entourage Web Services Edition. All of these downloads are available at the Mactopia download site, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.
Detailed information about how Entourage Web Services works and tips for how to upgrade to Entourage Web Services can be found at the Microsoft Mac IT Pros site, http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx.
Getting your IP back
By · CommentsSo you’re having trouble getting to the Internet? Can’t ping the Internet gateway? Can’t ping your own IP address? Have network adapters that refuse to enable or disable? Could be a corrupt IP stack. You can take a look at MSKB 299357, or you can follow these steps:
- Make sure you’re logged in with a local administrator account.
- Open a command prompt.
- Run the following command :
netsh int ip reset logfile.txt
where logfile.txt is the name of a file where the command can write its output. - When the command completes, run it again with a different filename for the output file.
- When that run completes, run it one more time, again with a different filename for the log file.
- Restart the computer in Safe Mode with Networking.
This will reset the TCP/IP settings back to sane defaults, which means all adapters in the computer will be set for DHCP. If you’re doing this on an SBS server, restarting in Safe Mode with Networking is absolutely crucial in order to avoid the dreaded 30 minute reboot. When the computer comes back up, set the network settings as needed, then reboot normally.
You may still have other issues, but these steps will get you a nice, clean, DHCP-enabled set of network adapters in the system.
Exchange 2003 SP2 and Exchange 2007 have options to require a security code on a device that will connect to the Exchange server using ActiveSync. This setting is optional in Exchange 2003 but is enabled by default in Exchange 2007. Without getting into the reasons why you might want to reconfigure Exchange 2007 so that ActiveSync devices do not require a device security code, if you do change the Mobile Device settings after an iPhone has already connected with ActiveSync and is requiring the password, you have to jump through a couple of hoops to actually get the iPhone to pick up the new security settings.
OK, they’re really small hoops, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless because I had to Google quite a bit to uncover this tidbit. To remove the security code requirement from the iPhone, do the following:
- Remove the Exchange account from the iPhone configuration.
- Turn off the security code in the iPhone settings.
- Add the Exchange account back to the iPhone configuration.
That’s it. If you’re prompted to create a security code when you re-add the Exchange account, then the Exchange policy hasn’t been modified correctly, and you need to dig into that. But if the requirement for the device security code has been correctly changed, you will not be prompted to enter a security code in step 3 above, and no reset of the iPhone is needed.
SSL Certificate Validation
By · CommentsI put up a post this morning regarding SSL certificate request validation over on the Third Tier web site. If you’ve been wondering how SSL certificates work in SBS 2008 or if you’re about to renew an SSL certificate on an SBS 2003 box, you might want to check out that post.
Troubleshooting Tale: Remote Access Loss on Server
By · CommentsYou can almost always count on interesting things happening during Update Weekend. Sometimes a patch will yield unexpected results, sometimes you lose access to the server after initiating a restart (and yet the server doesn’t actually restart), and so on. Well, this past weekend was no different, but the types of issues encountered was.
As such, I’m going to start a new series of posts in the vein of demonstrating how troubleshooting was approached during a particular situation to help others identify other possible troubleshooting steps or avenues when encountering problems. We’ll start with a rather typical behavior (restarted a server remotely and could not get access back to the server when it should have come up) that had a very unusual root problem.
Remotely Installing This Month’s ISA Update
By · CommentsJust a heads-up for those of you who remotely install security updates for your customers. This month includes an update for ISA, and if you don’t know about it beforehand, you could end up in a bit of a jam.
As expected, when installing the ISA update, access to the Internet through the server is interrupted. Unlike some previous updates, however, when the installation of this update completes, Internet access is NOT restored. You don’t get Internet back until you restart the server.
So if you don’t have some mechanism in place for restarting the server automatically after updates install, you could find yourself, and your customer, in a rather unexpected place.
Excel Security Update Applies to Mac Office, Too
By · CommentsMicrosoft released a couple of updates for their Excel spreadsheet product in the slate of monthly updates for April 2009. The security issues addressed in the update also apply to the Mac version of Excel as well. As such, Microsoft has released updates for both Office 2004 and Office 2008 for the Mac. The files can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx. Because of the nature of the update, all Mac Office users are encouraged to install this update as soon as possible.