TEAMAS

Hi Today I replaced my V+ box at home to a new shiny Virgin Media Tivo STB.  The user interface and controls will take some getting used to, but there are many new features which I am looking to get my teeth stuck into. One of them is the Virgin TV Anywhere App.  Having the ability to remotely stream and control my Tivo box is really interesting. When trying to use the App it asked me to ensure the STB was connected to the home network.  I dug around for a spare CAT5 cable (everything is wireless these days right?) and plugged it in. Still no joy.... OK so I go to the Tivo settings menu and selected Network and set it to use DHCP.  The result was the following there is a problem with your network settings, the specified IP address is outside the range of allowed IP addresses (C138) What?  My home network is in the 172.16.1.0/24 range.  That is definitely private.  I tried a static IP address, but the same message was displayed. I looked...

I am in the process of testing out XenDesktop 7.1 for a proof of concept project regarding delivering rich multimedia to a thin client desktop. I remembered that Citrix provided a cut down version of XenDesktop called "Express Edition" which allowed people to use the core of the product for up to 10 connections. This was great for lab environments, or people studying for exams. Whilst trying to apply a XenDesktop Express Edition licence to XenDesktop 7.1 I found it didn't work. I looked at the SA dates of the licence you download from www.citrix.com/activateXDexpress and it appears to be 2012.0217 which is quite old. According the console the SA date required for licences needs to be 2013.0522. This is confusing, because the Licence console within Citrix Studio is telling me to go to www.citrix.com/activateXDexpress What? Anyway, I posted a question on Citrix Discussions and it looks like Citrix have removed the Express Edition from XenDesktop 7.1.  It i...

I've come across a recent problem when trying to restore an Exchange 2003 mailbox at brick level to an Exchange 2010 environment using Arcserve.  The initial concern here is restoring from an old tape which was taken using an old version of Arcserve from an Exchange environment which no longer existed. In short, I couldn't restore to the Exchange 2010 server when trying to restore to an alternative location.  I was attempting to use Arcserve 16.5 to read the tape and restore the data to an Exchange 2010 server which has the Arcserve 16 agent installed. When I initially tested the restore, I ran a merge on the tape in Arcserve so I could see the available sessions.  To restore the mailbox I selected the source mailbox by drilling down to individual mailbox, I set the destination as the Exchange 2010 server and selected a subfolder of the Administrators mailbox also at brick level.  The message I received at the point of submitting the job was "Invalid destina...

Hi We are coming towards the end of our Exchange upgrade project.  The best part about these projects is removing old services and getting rid of old hardware or freeing space on the SAN array. Whilst trying to decommission our old Exchange 2007 CCR cluster, I received the following error message Welcome to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unattended Setup Preparing Exchange Setup The following server roles will be removed Clustered Mailbox Server Mailbox Role Management Tools Performing Microsoft Exchange Server Prerequisite Check Clustered Mailbox Role Checks ......................... FAILED The clustered mailbox server removal cannot continue: The specified clustered mailbox server exists, but its resource group contains at least one non-Exchange cluster resource (GxClusPlugIn (mail) (Instance001)). Mailbox Role Checks ......................... COMPLETED The Exchange Server Setup operation did not complete. For more information, visit http://support....

Hi All We are now coming to the end of our Exchange 2010 upgrade project and everything has gone pretty well so far. From time to time our administrators are asked to complete searches in Exchange.  This could be for a number of reasons e.g Data Protection request or a disciplinary query. In Exchange 2007 we used to complete multi mailbox searches using a third party tool which would use MAPI to search every users' mailbox for items which matched our search terms.  This process was extremely slow (90 hours to cover 2000 mailboxes) and not particular reliable. In Exchange 2010 Microsoft released a feature called Multi-Mailbox search.  This allowed administrators to search all of the mailboxes using the search index which is built into Exchange.  This means the searches in Exchange 2010 are much much quicker.  It also means that this search will look at attachments which is excellent, although does create far more results to review. MSExchange Link for m...

During our Exchange 2010 upgrade project we noticed the monitoring on one server stopped working. We use a product called Solarwinds, this uses a combination of Powershell, WMI and SNMP to monitor services on hardware and software from around the business. We noticed that Solarwinds would return the following error message when polling this particular server Network connection failed. HResult: No data to return. Error: Unable to connect to the specified computer, or the computer is offline. After a quick search online we found the following Solarwinds KB It recommends restarting the WMI service on the server. We completed this but the issue remained. One of my learned colleagues kept searching and found that the Remote Regsitry service was set to Manual. He set it to Automatic and started the server. Immediately the polling began to work! So if you have this problem, check the Remote Registry service! Sam Cheers to John Manley for finding this! Google +

Hi! I have been off the radar recently, knee deep in an Exchange 2007 to 2010 upgrade project.  It is something I have worked with a huge amount in the past, but I have really enjoyed getting to know how Exchange works and designing a cool system for my employers. Exchange 2010 is such a great step forward.  We have moved all of the storage off the SAN and gone for 3 mail servers with DAS and JBOD.  So far it is working pretty well. Anywho, we needed to migrate around 2000 mailboxes from 2007 to 2010.  In our old 2007 environment storage groups were created based on a users first intial of their first name e.g.  Storage Group S would hold me Sam Owens.  This was fine, but clearly there are lots of people whose name who begin with J and S.  You guessed it, the storage groups were massively diverse and difficult to keep on top of. Also naming the storage groups in this way leads you to make assumptions.  I saw a number of users who were crea...