If your inbound PPTP VPN and Remote Desktop / Terminal Services are failing recently, if you are a Qwest/CenturyLink DSL customer, check the firmware version of your device.

Model Number: PK5000
Firmware Version: QAP002-3.60.3.0.9.9-PK5000

According to the conversation I had with CenturyLink support this evening, a recent firmware update (the version listed above) is breaking PPTP VPN, and in my case, also our inbound TS sessions. CenturyLink is currently working with Actiontec to resolve. The workaround in the interim is to replace the Actiontec with a different model, a Zyxel model using the PK5000z model number.

If you are having trouble, check your DSL modem firmware and then contact CenturyLink support.

Join us at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters for the “home-field” event of the SMB MVP Worldwide Roadshow. This is one you will not want to miss!

We’ve joined forces with our friends to the south in Portland, The Technology Wizards (www.technologywizards.com), to bring in nine Microsoft MVPs for two power-packed days, Friday in Portland, and Saturday in Redmond. For the Redmond event, arrive at 9 AM for coffee and pastries and a chance to mingle with the MVPs before our 10 AM event start time. If you’re feeling the need for travel, sign up for Portland and Redmond’s events and join us for the train ride Friday evening back to Seattle!

Presentations will cover:
SBS 2011 Essentials
SBS 2011 Standard & Premium Add-on
Windows MultiPoint Server 2011
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2
Migrations (Jeff Middleton is in the house!)
HP Servers & PCs
Expanded discussion and Q&A time!

Continental breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snacks will be provided. The Redmond event is sponsored by PSSBS, HP, Microsoft, and SBS Migration. Admission is free. Registration is limited to 125, so register today!

http://www.smbmvptour.com/register

Scheduled to present:
Steve Banks
Susan Bradley
Dana Epp
Cliff Galiher
Andy Goodman
Russ Grover
Jeff Middleton
Kevin Royalty
Charlie Russel

The event will be at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus - Redwest Building E Emerald Auditorium - 5600 148th Avenue N.E.REDMOND, WA 98052. This is the same building we were at for Mark Russinovich’s Zero Day Malware Cleaning with the Sysinternals Tools event in July.

We will have a person at the main entrance of Redwest E to direct you to the Emerald Auditorium. For Bing directions to Redwest E Building, use the following link: http://binged.it/olOevZ

This event replaces our September 15th meeting.

NO MEETING THIS MONTH (June 16, 2011). I'm going to be up in Vancouver, BC for the SMB MVP Roadshow . We will be back to Lincoln Square July 21st with Spamsoap and a Saas Security presentation by them.

Redmond's SMB MVP Roadshow is going to be a larger one day event on Saturday, September 17, 2011. Will have details and registration information for that event soon.

Thanks,
Steve

Having trouble viewing your security cameras using Milestone XProtect Smart Client software (www.milestonesys.com) from behind your Calyptix AccessEnforcer (www.calyptix.com)? Add the public IP address of your camera system to the Web Filter Exemptions list in the AccessEnforcer and you should be set.

In my opinion, save yourself the pain and agony so many of us have gone through, and do not install Windows 7 SP1 via WSUS until Microsoft figures out what is causing it to hang on deployments. At this point, I would not recommend installing it from anything but a DVD or ISO of the full Service Pack. That has been successful for me; if the machine wasn't already messed up by a WSUS deployment attempt of SP1, in which case it still fails.

See the following posts for the pain. And the word from Microsoft is to not modify your pending.xml. You may cause yourself more harm down the road if you do.

Error 0xC0000034 during Service Pack 1 installations for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installation fails with error code c0000034

Why you don’t want to edit your pending.xml to resolve 0xC0000034 issues

If you are seeing a Fatal error C0000034

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby from Commercial Technical Support]

A couple weeks we published an article on how to add an additional email address to an O365 account. When you receive email for a user with multiple email addresses, the To line will always display the primary email. For Example, let’s say you have a user named Don and his email is Don@contoso.com. He also has a secondary email address of Sales@contoso.com. When Don looks at his email in Outlook, mail sent to Sales@contoso.com will appear to have been sent to Don@contoso.com.

In some cases people want to know exactly what address an email was sent to. You could always look at the headers, but this is cumbersome. A better way to handle this is to create an Outlook rule.

To do this in Outlook 2010:

1. From the Home tab click Rules > Create Rule…
2. Click the Advanced Options… button.
   
3. Check the with specific words in the message header checkbox.
   
4. Click specific rules link and the secondary email you wish this rule to apply to. In this example I entered sales@contoso.com.
   
5. Click Ok and then Next.
6. From here you can decided what you want to do to the message. Common options would be to move it to a folder or to assign it a category. You can even apply multiple actions. In this example I am just going to move the message to a folder I created named Sales.
   
7. Click Finish.

Now when you receive email sent to the secondary address(es) this rule will run and apply your custom action to it.

[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Benny Peter from Commercial Technical Support]

After your client computer is connected to the SBS 2011 Essentials server, you’ll also have a new application added to your desktop, the Launchpad shown below. This application gives you quick access to your backups for this computer, as well as any Shared Folders that have been provisioned for the SBS network. The Remote Web Access link will attempt to connect to the SBS 2011 Essentials version of Remote Web Access.

This connector configures the client computer backup settings and also installs a Launchpad application on the client computer.

The following links are available on the SBS 2011 Launchpad:

Backup

You can click Backup on the Launchpad to bring up the Backup Properties dialog box as shown in the below figure. From here, you can view previous backups, start a new backup, and change the Power Management settings.

Remote Web Access

The Remote Web Access enables you to access the network resources and connect to other computers from office or any remote location. We will talk more about Remote Web Access in the SBS 2011 Essentials in the forthcoming blog.

To learn more about Remote Web Access in the SBS 2011 Standard, please see the following link: Introduction to SBS 2011 Standard Remote Web Access (RWA).

Shared Folders

Clicking on the Shared Folders link will open the Windows Explorer to the location of shared folders on the server. You can also create additional folders as needed. You can upload or download files to any of the shared folders that are listed by dragging and dropping files between the local computer and the shared folders.

Dashboard

From the Launchpad, you can also connect to the Dashboard for the SBS 2011 Essentials server. Click Dashboard on the Launchpad to open the Dashboard window. From the Dashboard, you can configure your SBS 2011 Essentials server without having to have a keyboard, mouse, or monitor connected to it. We will talk more about Dashboard in a forthcoming blog.

Computer Health Alerts

Launchpad provides a quick health status of the computer. The notification area displays health alerts. Clicking on the alert provides a possible resolution. The most severe alerts appear first in the list. Less severe alerts appear later in the list.

Logging

Launchpad.log file can be found on the client machine at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Server\Logs.  Note:  ProgramData folder is hidden, to view the folder follow the steps in the link below: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows7/Show-hidden-files.

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of John Bay from Commercial Technical Support]

The Small Business Server 2011 Essentials server is designed to seamlessly integrate into an existing network infrastructure. The network card on the server is configured to acquire an IP address from a DHCP server. Typically, the DHCP server will be the router. The server is an Active Directory domain controller and as such it functions as a DNS server. In order for the clients to properly locate the Active Directory, the network card on the client is typically configured to point to the IP address of the SBS 2011 Essentials server. Since the Essentials server is a DHCP client itself, the IP address of the server may change. In Essentials, we had to develop a method to ensure that the client is always pointing to the right IP address for DNS. When the client is joined to the Essentials domain using http://server/connect, a service named Windows Server LAN Configuration is installed on the client. This service is responsible for determining the IP address of the SBS Essentials server and properly configuring the DNS settings on the client machine.

The Windows Server LAN Configuration service will monitor the client IP address. If the client IP address has changed, the service will configure the primary DNS address to be automatic assigned from DHCP and it will send a Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) network call to look for the SBS Essentials server. If the SBS Essentials server is found, a quick DNS test is performed. If the server responds to the DNS request, the primary DNS server on the client will be set to static assigned with the IP address of the SBS 2011 Essentials server that was found on the network via the UPnP call. If the client is a laptop, and changes locations so that they receive a new IP from DHCP either via their home network/wi-fi hotspot or other, the service will send out the UPNP request and in this case no server will be found and the primary DNS address will be set to automatic (via DHCP).

The SBS 2011 Essentials server itself is using a dynamic IP, so the client must make sure that it is updated with the latest IP address for the server. The LAN Configuration Service on the client will contact the server every 30 seconds, and the server will respond with its IP address. If the IP address has changed the client will then update its primary DNS address accordingly. If the server does not respond, the client will switch the DNS address back to automatic assigned from DHCP. So if the SBS Essentials server is down for maintenance, the clients will automatically change the DNS address to DHCP assigned and they will still have Internet access.

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff and Justin Crosby from Commercial Technical Support]

One of the most requested features for the SBS Monitoring component of Windows SBS 2008 and Windows SBS 2011 Standard is the ability to control and filter unwanted errors from the event logs section of the reports.

There are a number of known events that can be safely ignored. Also depending on the particular environment you might have your own list of events you want to ignore. You cannot accomplish this with the built-in, out-of-box, functionality.

This, as-is solution, was built by engineers from the SBS support team and is aimed at improving the functionality and effectiveness of the SBS Monitoring reports.

The relevant portion of a detailed report from SBS 2011 standard before installing the new functionality:

The same report with the feature installed using the default exclusions:

Notice how the critical event count went from 12 to 5, and unimportant DCOM and WinRM events have been hidden.

How it works

This solution configures a database table with a number of source:event combinations (known as exclusions) that need not be collected from the event logs, for example: DCOM 10016. Upon installing the solution a default set of exclusions are added depending on the version of SBS and the existing instances that have already been collected are removed. The same is true when a new exclusion is added manually, existing source:events instances will be deleted.

Upon removing an exclusion or uninstalling the solution, the process of collecting all events will resume and only after the event is experienced again it will then be collected and will appear on the report.

Installation and Usage

1. Download and extract the SBSAlertsCleanup package which is hosted on the SBS Support Team’s SkyDrive.
2. Open the location of the extracted files and then the properties of SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 file.
3. Unblock the file if the option is shown. Note: you do not need to do this to the .sql files.
4. Launch an elevated PowerShell prompt.
5. From PowerShell, browse to the folder where you extracted the files.
6. From PowerShell, run:
   .\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action install [enter]

You will see “Changed database context to ‘SBSMonitoring’

Listing current Exclusions

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action ListExclusions

ID Event Source
-- ----- ------
1 129 WinRM
2 142 WinRM
3 4107 Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
4 10016 DCOM
5 10009 DCOM
6 5586 SharePoint Foundation
7 6772 SharePoint Foundation
8 6398 SharePoint Foundation
9 8 MSExchange CmdletLogs
10 6 MSExchange CmdletLogs

Removing an Exclusion

This is a 2 part process, first you have to list the current exclusions, and then we can pick which one to remove.

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action ListExclusions

ID Event Source
-- ----- ------
1 129 WinRM
2 142 WinRM
3 4107 Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
4 10016 DCOM
5 10009 DCOM
6 5586 SharePoint Foundation
7 6772 SharePoint Foundation
8 6398 SharePoint Foundation
9 8 MSExchange CmdletLogs
10 6 MSExchange CmdletLogs

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action RemoveExclusion –ID 1
Removing Exclusion for Source: WinRM, EventID: 129

To confirm:

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action ListExclusions

ID Event Source
-- ----- ------
2 142 WinRM
3 4107 Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
4 10016 DCOM
5 10009 DCOM
6 5586 SharePoint Foundation
7 6772 SharePoint Foundation
8 6398 SharePoint Foundation
9 8 MSExchange CmdletLogs
10 6 MSExchange CmdletLogs

Adding an Exclusion

This is a 2 part process, first you have to list the available instances of events that have already been collected, and then we can pick which one to exclude.

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action ListEvents

ID Event Source
-- ----- ------
346141 11 Disk
349778 13 Server Infrastructure Licensing
349779 14 Server Infrastructure Licensing
349781 15 Server Infrastructure Licensing
349552 25 WindowsUpdateClient
349832 54 MSExchange OWA
349827 135 WinRM
349795 502 Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard
349809 1000 Application Error
343153 1016 DhcpServer
342822 2002 ESENT
348341 2007 ESE
342823 2007 ESENT

Let’s say that the administrator was been receiving several events for WindowsUpdateClient 25 on a regular basis. The admin has investigated this event and determined that it is not cause for concern on their network and they would no longer like to be notified about this event. The admin can do the following to exclude this event from the report:

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action AddExclusion –ID 349552

Adding Exclusion for Source: WindowsUpdateClient, EventID: 25

To confirm:

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action ListExclusions

ID Event Source
-- ----- ------
2 142 WinRM
3 4107 Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
4 10016 DCOM
5 10009 DCOM
6 5586 SharePoint Foundation
7 6772 SharePoint Foundation
8 6398 SharePoint Foundation
9 8 MSExchange CmdletLogs
10 6 MSExchange CmdletLogs
11 25 WindowsUpdateClient

Uninstalling

Upon removing an exclusion or uninstalling the product, the process of collecting all events will resume and only after the event is experienced again it will then be collected and will appear on the report.

.\SBSAlertsCleanup.ps1 –Action Uninstall

Default set of exclusions

We install a set of common exclusions for known events that are generally considered as ignorable. This may not be the case for each and every server so you might have to tweak the list of exclusions, removing and adding as needed as to make your reports show relevant errors that could be of interest for someone administering the health of the server.

SBS 2008

• 10016 DCOM
• 10009 DCOM

SBS 2011 Standard

• 129 WinRM
• 142 WinRM
• 4107 Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
• 10016 DCOM
• 10009 DCOM
• 5586 SharePoint Foundation
• 6772 SharePoint Foundation
• 6398 SharePoint Foundation
• 8 MSExchange CmdletLogs
• 6 MSExchange CmdletLogs

Hopefully, this simple enhancement can help you regain control of the reports and fine tune them to your needs.

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby from Commercial Technical Support]

Sometimes you will want one user to receive email at multiple email addresses. This blog post will show you have to add additional email addresses to one of your existing Office 365 user accounts. Please note that even though a user may have multiple email addresses, there email will always appear to be from the address listed as Primary.

1. Open the Office 365 administration site at https://portal.microsoftonline.com/Admin/Default.aspx and log in as an administrator.
2. Select Users underneath Management on the left-hand task bar.
3. Click the user you wish to modify.
4. Click More.
   
5. Click Change mailbox settings (This will open a new browser window).
6. Expand E-mail Options.
7. Click Add… under Other e-mail addresses
   
8. Enter the email address and click Ok.
   
9. Once you have made all your changes, click Save.

Full Report

Research Summary

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January 21, 2012

Lesley Field

Acting Administrator

Office of Federal Procurement  Policy

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The economic condition of small businesses in the United States is captured in the latest edition of the  Small Business Profiles for the States and Territories.

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