Cisco Router Break Sequence

Quick and dirty tip for somehting I'm always forgetting.

If you are doing a traceroute on your Cisco router and need to tell it to stop (it'll go on for ages otherwise) hit:

CTRL-SHIFT-6 three times in a row to break out of it.

Exchange ActiveSync errors with misconfigured firewall

I have recently been getting error messages on my Exchange server which has been implying that my Cisco ASA firewall is misconfigured.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Server ActiveSync
Event Category: None
Event ID: 3033
Date:
Time:
User:
Computer:
Computer_Name
Description:
The average of the most recent [200] heartbeat intervals used by clients is less than or equal to [9]. Make sure that your firewall configuration is set to work correctly with Exchange ActiveSync and direct push technology. Specifically, make sure that your firewall is configured so that requests to Exchange ActiveSync do not expire before they have the opportunity to be processed.
For more information about how to configure firewall settings when using Exchange ActiveSync, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 905013, "Enterprise Firewall Configuration for Exchange ActiveSync Direct Push Technology" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=3052&kbid=905013).

This issue may occur if the firewall has not been configured to let HTTP(S) requests live longer than the minimum heartbeat interval that is configured on the server that is running Exchange Server 2003 SP2. By default, the minimum heartbeat interval at which the Exchange server triggers this event is nine minutes.


I hunted around for instructions on how to make these changes, and eventully had to contact Cisco to find out what changes to make:


1. Create an access-list to identify the traffic to the server & traffic initiated by the server. For example, server’s Internet IP Address is 1.1.1.1, use the following:
access-list outside-https-mail-servers extended permit ip any host 1.1.1.1
access-list outside-https-mail-servers extended permit ip host 1.1.1.1 any

2. Apply the access-list to the class map:
class-map https_server
 match access-list outside-https-mail-servers

3. Apply the class map to the policy map so that we can increase the timeout for that traffic:
 policy-map outside-policy
 class https_server
  set connection timeout half-closed 0:30:00

...and that should clear your errors!

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Get a Redhat/CentOS/Oracle Enterprise Linux box to register on a Windows DNS

I live mainly in a Windows world, but occasionally I have to got down and dirty with a Linux box.

One of my particular hates is the way Linux will use a DHCP address supplied by a Windows server, but won't register itself in the DNS, so I have to go and put a static entry into my DNS.

After MUCH hunting around, I finally managed to get it working... and it's actually a very simple problem to fix...

On your DHCP server, right click on the Scope and change the DNS tab page to match below. It seems that Linux machines don't send out a "register me in the DNS" message (which Windows machines do), and you need to make the below changes to force the DHCP server to always send new registrations to the DNS.

 

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Can't Export from Oracle

So, you've been using Oracle and want to export your data out to a spreadsheet... easy huh? Just click File - Export and a window pops up and closes straight away! What the...!!!

This took me ages to work out, so hopefully it'll save you some time.

First, add the site to your Trusted Sites List - if you trust it with your finances, you should be happy to do this :)

Then click on Custom Level and set 

Downloads > Automatic Prompting for file downloads to Enable 

Downloads > File downloads to Enable

A quick restart of IE, and you should be able to File > Export from Oracle with ease.

You may also want to associate TSV files Excel, just right click it and select Open, Select a program from a list of installed programs and choose Excel

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Oracle "Yellow Bar" stops cut and paste

Sometimes installing the Oracle Jinitiator just doesn't go through properly. I recently had the experience of trying to install it several times, and it crashing out right at the end.

Assuming that it had probably done all the good bits earlier in the install, I ignored the error and fired up the URL, and up popped the Oracle window!

However, at the bottom of the windows were yellow warning bars, and I could not cut and paste into it.

After hunting around on the internet for a while, I worked out that it was something to do with the identitydb.obj file, so rather than get deep down into the hows and whys, I just copied the file from a working machine over onto the new PC and after a quick restart of IE, everything was fine once more!

You can fine the file in c:\program files\oracle\identitydb.obj

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Exchange 2007 not receiving Internet emails

I recently had an issue with a new Exchange 2007 server which could send emails to other Exchange 2003 users, and outgoing Internet emails, but when the Internet user replied, they got the following error message:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
blah@blah.com
Your message wasn't delivered because of security policies. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.
The following organization rejected your message: mailserver.blah.com

---

Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Diagnostic information for administrators:
Generating server: blah.com
blah@blah.com
mailserver.blah.com #550 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender ##
Original message headers:
.....

After much hunting around I found that this was because the default recieve connectoron "mailserver" hadn't been configured to accept unauthenticated connections (like SMTP from outside the organisation). Running the following command fixed it immediately, and no, it doesn't mean your system can be used to relay.

Add-AdPermission -Identity "Default MAILSERVER" -User "NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users" -ExtendedRights ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender

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Popcorn Hour Samba issues with Windows 7

I have owned a Popcorn Hour media streamer for a couple of years now, and been very impressed with it's support for pretty much any video file I throw at it.

I recently upgraded my NAS from a DroboShare to a Windows 7 Professional PC with the drobo attached directly.

Everything wa going swimmingly, but for some reason the PCH kept losing connection to the SMB share on the Win 7 machine. It kept giving me a "No content found" message whne connecting to the share.

When I browse to the share, I can see the server but the PCH reports that there are no shares on the PC. Other Windows clients have no problem accessing the shares.
If I rebooted the Popcorn Hour I got an "out of memory" error when accessing the server!

After much reading around, I started to despair.. turning off Homegroup didn't work, neither did wuninstalling Windows Live Login Assistant.

Eventually I spotted the following error in my event log:

Source: srv

Event ID: 2017

Level: Error

The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

Now I had something to trach down, and sure enough at the bottom of http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897446.aspx

I found the follwoing instructions:

Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache to 1
Set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size to 3

Womder of wonders, the issue has now been fixed!

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