Alexander’s Blog

Have you run into a situation where your users are getting an unexpected login prompt? If your Outlook 2007 users are configured to use NTLM authentication yet they are receiving a login prompt, which they shouldn’t, you need to modify Outlook Anywhere settings for the Autodiscover service. More specifically, you need to use the Exchange Management Shell and modify a server-side setting for Outlook Anywhere. This should be done on the server that is running the Client Access server role. For the Autodiscover service, you should set the value for the Server attribute for the EXPR OutlookProvider object to $null for the Outlook Anywhere configuration settings. Here’s how.

Make sure you have the proper permissions to modify the settings on the Exchange 2007 Server. For example logon as an account that has the Exchange Organization Administrator role. Start the Exchange Management Shell and run the following command:

Set-OutlookProvider EXPR -Server $null

In order for the changes to take effect, you should either restart Internet Information Services (IIS) or recycle MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool on the Exchange server that’s running the Client Access server role.

Restarting IIS is simple but if you decide to recycle MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool, you need to go to Application Pools container in the IIS console. Right-click MSExchangeAutodiscoverAppPool and select Recycle. You will not expect any messages confirming your action but the application pool will get recycled. If you have any doubts whether the recycling of the application pool took place then you can restart IIS instead, which will also accomplish the same thing.

TechRepublic’s blog has a nice posting by author Rick Vanover called 10 cool things you can do with Windows PowerShell. The article lists the following cool things to do with Windows PowerShell.

#1: Report all of the USB devices installed
#2: Perform your favorite CMD tasks in PowerShell
#3: Kill a process in PowerShell instead of Task Manager
#4: Use PSDrive to view more than just drives
#5: Export NTFS folder permissions — recursive or not
#6: Play with PowerShell 2.0
#7: Work from the keyboard in Graphical PowerShell
#8: Background a time-consuming task
#9: Insert timestamps into PowerShell outputs
#10: Stop and smell the roses

Check out this link for more details on how you can benefit from these cool tips. Considering the fact that Windows PowerShell is now a core part of Exchange 2007, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008, you will find these tips handy while you work with Windows PowerShell.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 supports both American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and UNICODE personal folders (.pst) and offline folder (.ost) files. You can use the following four registry entries to limit the size of both the .pst and the .ost files:

• The MaxFileSize registry entry
• The WarnFileSize registry entry
• The MaxLargeFileSize registry entry
• The WarnLargeFileSize registry entry

Note The WarnLargeFileSize and WarnFileSize registry entries do not enable Outlook to warn you before the file size limit is reached.

Thew default values for these entires are:

MaxLargeFileSize = 20 GB

WarnLargeFileSize = 19 GB

MaxFileSize = 1.933 GB

WarnFileSize = 1.816 GB

The policy location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor.

Outlook 2007

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST

The user preference location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST

Outlook 2003

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\PST

The user preference location for the registry entries is located in the following path in Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\PST

Check out Microsoft’s KB article 832925 for more details on this topic.

The other day, while working at a client on a consulting assignment, I was using my Firefox browser and going through my client’s proxy server. I was able to connect to most sites but not all. For example, I wasn’t able to get to a KB article that I needed on Microsoft’s Web site.

When I entered the proxy server address in Internet Explorer (IE) and tried to connect to the sites that I couldn’t connect in Firefox, I was able to connect just fine. Then I switched to Firefox and was able to connect to all the sites that I couldn’t connect earlier. So what I discovered is this. When you use Firefox’s IE Tab Add-on (that lets you run the IE engine in a Firefox tab) it doesn’t just mimic IE behavior, it actually uses IE settings as well, such as the proxy server settings that are configured in IE. Hope this helps you if you run into this situation some day.

Are you getting the following error on your Windows Server 2003? If so, your event viewer is probably displaying this error every 5 minutes.

Event ID: 1054
Source: Userenv
Type: Error
Description: Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted). Group Policy processing aborted.

Microsoft’s KB article 324174 addresses this issue. This behavior may occur if the address for the configured preferred DNS server on the client is invalid or unreachable. This error may also cause the client computer to take a long time to logon. To resolve this issue, correct the DNS address in the TCP/IP properties.

NOTE: If you are getting this error in Windows XP, then check out this KB article 298656.