Technology

Exchange 2003 : Logging

If you are trying to troubleshoot an issue with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and need more verbose logging, you can get additional logging by

1) Launch Exchange System Manager
2) Drill down to the server in the Administrative Groups
3) Right click on server and click on properties
4) Open the “Diagnostic Logging” tab and enable logging on any of the exchange modules

You can check the logs from the event viewer.

Programming : C#

I have been itching to program in C# for a long time now.. finally got a chance to try it out due to requirement at work. Here’s a small snippet of code that does a bunch of things
1) Opens a directory and get a list of files in it
2) Parses the file name into multiple variables
3) Connects to Active Directory and gets properties for a user
4) Creates an error file with list of errors.
5) Creat an output file in csv format.

For the programming gurus out there, this should be pretty easy :).. I am sure that there are tons of errors in the way, I wrote the code, but this is a beginning :).


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.DirectoryServices;

namespace sortAssetData
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Create a Log file and output file

System.IO.TextWriter infoLog = new System.IO.StreamWriter(“sortAssetDataLog.txt”);
System.IO.TextWriter outputLog = new System.IO.StreamWriter(“finalAssetData.csv”);

// Write the column headers into the output file
outputLog.WriteLine(“Last_Name, First_Name, Display_Name, Batt_Check_Version, Model_Type, Model_Number, Serial_Number, Batt_Manufacturer, Batt_Model, Batt_Serial_Number, Affected”);

// Define the folder where the data files are sitting
string fixDirectoy = “P:\\BatteryCheck_Results”;

// Change working directory to the folder with all the files
System.IO.Directory.SetCurrentDirectory(fixDirectoy);

// Create a directory object to get list of asset files
System.IO.DirectoryInfo tempDirObject = new System.IO.DirectoryInfo(fixDirectoy);

// Get list of *.csv files in the asset folder
System.IO.FileInfo[] listOfFiles = tempDirObject.GetFiles(“*.csv”);

// Process each file in the directory
foreach (System.IO.FileInfo tempFile in listOfFiles)
{
// Display the current file that is being processed
System.Console.WriteLine(“Processing : {0}”, tempFile.Name);
infoLog.WriteLine(“Processing : {0}”, tempFile.Name);
infoLog.Flush();

// Split the file name into Domain, Hostname, Username
string tempData = tempFile.Name;
// Removing the .csv at the end of the file name
tempData = tempData.Replace(“.csv”, “”);
string[] sortData = tempData.Split(new Char[] { ‘_’ });

// If file name doesn’t contain 3 records (Domain, ComputerName and UserName), we ignore it
if (sortData.Length != 3)
{
infoLog.WriteLine(“ERROR : Bad file format : {0}”, tempFile.Name);
infoLog.Flush();
continue;
}

// Display the userdata we got from the file name
System.Console.WriteLine(“\nDomain :\t {0}”, sortData[0]);
System.Console.WriteLine(“Computer Name :\t {0}”, sortData[1]);
System.Console.WriteLine(“User Name :\t {0}\n”, sortData[2]);

// Get the users full name from ActiveDirectory
System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher searchUser = new System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher();
searchUser.Filter = String.Format(“(SAMAccountName={0})”, sortData[2]);
searchUser.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“cn”);
searchUser.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“givenname”);
searchUser.PropertiesToLoad.Add(“sn”);
System.DirectoryServices.SearchResult resultFromAD = searchUser.FindOne();

// If the username doesn’t have a AD account, note and skip to the next file
if (resultFromAD == null)
{
System.Console.WriteLine(“ERROR : Bad User name : {0}”, sortData[2]);
infoLog.WriteLine(“ERROR : Bad User name : {0}”, sortData[2]);
infoLog.Flush();
continue;
}
else
{
//Parse the file and write data to the log file and also to the screen
System.IO.StreamReader tempSoureFile = new System.IO.StreamReader(tempFile.Name);
// Read the first line in the file and ignore it
string tempAssetData = tempSoureFile.ReadLine();
// Read the second line and store it to write to outputfile
tempAssetData = tempSoureFile.ReadLine();

string tempUserFirstName = resultFromAD.Properties[“sn”][0].ToString();
string tempUserLastName = resultFromAD.Properties[“givenname”][0].ToString();
string tempUserDisplayName = resultFromAD.Properties[“cn”][0].ToString();
outputLog.WriteLine(“{0},{1},{2},{3}”, tempUserFirstName, tempUserLastName, tempUserDisplayName, tempAssetData);
outputLog.Flush();
System.Console.WriteLine(“User First Name:\t {0}”, tempUserFirstName);
System.Console.WriteLine(“User Last Name:\t\t {0}”, tempUserLastName);
System.Console.WriteLine(“Display Name:\t\t {0}”, tempUserDisplayName);
}
}
System.Console.ReadKey();
infoLog.Close();
outputLog.Close();
}
}
}


Microsoft Excel : How to repair "Opening blank file when double clicking on an excel file"

Ran into an interesting problem with troubleshooting an Excel issue. Double clicking on an excel file opened a blank file on the affected machine. I thought it might be something related to the associations and checked them from “Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types” in the Windows Explorer menu. Everything was in order there. I then tried a reinstall of Office (note : would not do this in the future without additional troubleshooting 🙂 ). That didn’t help either. Finally, I gave up and did a Google search, which returned this URL

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.office.misc/browse_thread/thread/aa3da7b29cd55a93/3347ca4c2ea6673a%233347ca4c2ea6673a

Did the following according to the post and everything returned to default settings

1) Run Excel with “/safe” option.
2) Click on “help -> Detect and Repair” from the Excel menu
3) Close Excel for repair

Thx Google.

HOW TO : Blackberry : How to use it as a modem

On popular demand..A lot of people asked me how you can use the BB as a modem, the way I specified in this post. Here’s the link with detailed instructions on how to do this..

http://www.blackberryforums.com/blackberry-guides/2019-user-howto-use-blackberry-modem-laptop-11.html

Note: Make sure you have an unlimited data plan from your service provider or you can get dinged with a large bill :).

RDP over SSH tunnel

Necessity is the mother of invention.. Or so goes the old saying. I was on-call this weekend for off hour IT support. We usually provide our on-call engineers a wireless broadband card in case they need to get connected to the corporate network to troubleshoot/fix issues. This week, I was not able to get the wireless card, since we had to loan it to an exec. The only method to get onto the Internet was using my new 8700 blackberry. We have the EDGE service from T-mobile, which is not as fast as the Verizon BroadbandAccess.. We typically get ~128kbps with the EDGE connection and is enough to get our work done.. The problem with using the BB as a modem is that T-mobile blocks PPTP/IPSec traffic with this plan. Not to be outdone, I came up with a way to use the BB to connect to our internal network. Most of our support work is done on Windows, so we need to remote console into one of our servers to provide support. I did the following to get this working using our corporate SSH gateway to tunnel RDP traffic.

1) Download Putty (SSH Client).
2) Create a new session on Putty to the SSH gateway. In the “Tunnels” option, add the following options

Note: Replace the REMOTE_HOST with the IP address or hostname of your Windows server.
3) Click on ADD
4) Click on Open and connect to the SSH server with your credentials
5) Log into the remote serve by running the following command “mstsc /v:127.0.01:3390
Note: You can change the local port to any number you want. Make sure not to use 3389 as the local port, since it is already used by the remote desktop service on your windows workstation.

Disaster strikes Kudithipudi.Org – Part II

One makes mistakes in haste, or so goes the ancient saying :). As soon as I discovered that my hosting company for the past few years did not store backups for longer than a day, I switched to 1and1.com, but little did I know that 1an1.com doesn’t provide web site logs (statistics) with their basic package. Well, serves me right for not doing my research right. Now I am with the third hosting provider in as many days. While the admin interface is not as polished as 1and1.com, I like that hostrocket provides all the features that I want for a relatively inexpensive price and the fact that it has a 20-something CEO.Hopefully I am going to be here for a while.. 🙂

One a side note, I am working on restoring all my old posts. Expect to see them up in a few days. Need to engage my uber-database-guru friend for help with the restore :).

Disaster strikes Kudithipudi.org!!

As many of you might have noticed, Kudithipudi.org has been down for the last couple of days. The database containing all the posts got corrupted and my hosting provider didn’t have backups from which I could restore the data.. As you can imagine, I have a new hosting provider now. I am trying to restore as much data as I can from the old site. This is pretty embarassing for me, since I am in the business of providing IT Services. This just validates the need for a good backup :). I am going to start using the new feature in WordPress which automatically sends a backup of the database to an e-mail address. Live and learn!! 🙂

HOW TO : Update non-domain members using WSUS

WSUS is a free tool from Microsoft that enables administrators to easily manage and deploy updates across the organization. WSUS is mainly used is enterprises with AD deployments, where the WSUS settings can be easily propagated to the workstations using group policy. So how does one keep their workstation/server updated without being part of the AD domain? You can do it by

1) Edit the local computer policy of the workstation/server by running “gpedit.msc
2) Drill down to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update and change the settings for “Specify intranet Microsoft update service location“.
3) Restart the workstation.