Mr Chuckles dot net

Last week I mentioned a bizarre problem that occurred during an Exchange 2000 to 2003 migration for a client. Shortly after posting that little expository, I discovered another.

The customer called to indicate one of his user’s Inbox had been moved to his Deleted Items folder. I had never before seen this, as Outlook prevents users from making such “mistakes” with special folders. I’d heard rumors that previous versions of OWA would allow users to do this, however he insisted that it just appeared this way after the migration. What was really strange was that new email continued to be delivered to this seemingly “deleted” inbox. No attempt to move the folder back to the root of his mailbox would work, and Google turned up little helpful information this time. Deleting the Outlook profile and all of its offline cache goodies proved futile, and I was on the verge exporting his mailbox to a PST file and nuking it, when The Google finally answered.

Turns out some random bloke on a Technet message board had this problem when moving users from Exchange 2003 to 2007, and after some of the same steps I had taken, he had found the solution that worked equally well for me. Moving the user back to the old server, then back AGAIN to the new server put the Inbox back where it belonged. While I don’t understand the root cause of this problem, I’m glad to have solved it without the pains of nuking a mailbox. Just further proves that keeping an old Exchange server around for a few weeks after its migration is a Smart Move™.

After a nasty power outage a few weeks ago at Key, I realized that I had never installed APC’s wonderful Network Shutdown tool on our VMware server. The Network Shutdown tool is a service that runs on just about any OS, and communicates with APC’s network-enabled UPSes. When the UPS detects a power failure and reaches a battery life threshold, it will issue a command to each computer running the Network Shutdown tool to, obviously enough, shut down. I’ve installed this on many Linux boxes in the past, so I figured this would be no different.

A quick Google search turned up numerous hits about a VMware specific RPM available from APC for v2.21. A quick search of APC’s website turned up no such thing, and downloading the newest release for Linux didn’t get me very far. During the installation it through an error about VMware not being supported. After some further Google digging, I finally found a direct link to the RPM buried on APC’s FTP site. Installing the RPM worked like a champ, and once I opened up the requisite firewall ports in ESX I was able to access the web interface and get it configured.

To save others the same headaches I encountered, I’ve preserved the RPM file on my site until APC decides to support VMware in new releases again. The file is available below.

APC Network Shutdown v2.21 for VMware

I migrated a client from SBS/Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 this weekend. On the server-side, everything went quite smooth, despite my fears that SBS would really screw with my ability to work with the standard Windows and Exchange tools. Not so much on the client side.

All the clients were running Outlook 2003. Some users were seeing duplicates of many of their system-level folders (Inbox, Calendar, etc). All users were unable to access any folder but their Inbox. Trying to view the calendar, contacts, or even a user-created mail folder would cause Outlook to crash. I suspected it had something to do with offline folder files, although deleting the Outlook profile and it’s associated OST files had no affect. A bit of Googling finally turned up this post at joeware, which pointed to this post in the Microsoft newsgroups, which contained the answer.

After some work, we were able to determine why Outlook 2003 crashes after moving mailboxes off of Exchange 2000 onto Exchange 2003. The fix is to add a registry value “Guid-Replid Caching” under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\SERVERNAME. Under each mailbox store we added a REG_DWORD of “Guid-Replid Caching” with a value of 0.

Taking their advice, I made the change, restarted the Exchange IS service, and damn if that didn’t solve the problem.

Okay, so it’s been 7 months since I originally wrote about my search for a dual WAN router (or even since I updated this blog… sad). In that time, I did eventually find a solution, but it was a long, painful road. The road began with a look at load balancers, an extremely complex and expensive bunch of boxes designed to do way more than I need (or could afford). Then came the Cisco 1841, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend $2000 on a simple router for a $160 a month cable connection. After that, I was working with a company (who shall remain nameless) to develop their existing load balancer product into a link balancer, but it wasn’t ready for prime time, and I had to pass. So, 4 months past my implementation date, and I was back to square one. The Linux box was looking better and better.

This whole project changed when I happened to check-up on pfSense, a firewall distribution based on FreeBSD. Lo and behold, they had added multiple WAN support over the summer. A quick download and test run later, and I had my winner. It had the raw support for the features that I need, with the polish coming down the pike in the coming months. It was free, since I already had a spare server to put it on. It was configured completely through a web interface, making for easy administration. It was… a done deal.

We went live with the setup before Christmas, and it’s been running flawlessly. Policy-based routing allows me to control which packets go where, and strong NAT/firewall rules make it a breeze to publish services out to the world. I’ve even got it running a fourth interface for a guest VLAN. More on that later…

So, I’ve been trying to find the best way to provide some extra Internet bandwidth at work without breaking the bank. My initial thought was to double up my T, until I realized how much that would cost me per month, and I still wouldn’t come close to the speed of my home cable modem connection. So, I’ve decided to bring in a Comcast business cable modem as our primary “web” connection. We’ll maintain the T for published services, outgoing email, and redundancy. Simple, cheap, great.

With the easy part out of the way, I embarked on a quest to manage two WAN links. Our firewall/gateway is a Microsoft ISA Server, which doesn’t support multiple WAN links. The only ISA add-on that does support multiple WAN links has just been deemed end of life by EMC. Just as well, as it was $3000. So, I began looking for hardware solutions. Thus began the hard part.
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Over the last 4 months I’ve been attempting to track down and solve a problem with ISA Server and an SSL web service we were using. Initial access to the site was fine, but about 3 or 4 pages in, access would become painfully slow and page elements or entire pages would fail to load. This problem was most evident in Internet Explorer, but would also appear in Firefox. It was also most visible on this one particular web service we use, but at times showed up on many other SSL-enabled sites. Last Monday I finally figured out what was happening and solved the problem. It was right in my face the whole time.
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