technical solutions and commentary

When trying to send email to a personal Outlook Distribution Group in Outlook an error may popup that reads omehting like “Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are not valid. Internal support function returned an error.”

This may be resolved by creating a new Outlook Profile and deleting specific Outlook data files. Follow the steps in Microsoft KB 320842.

In the instance that the Contacts and Distribution Groups were imported into Outlook from AOL or another external source, creating a new Outlook profile and such will likely not fix the issue. This is due to the way Distribution Lists are stored by third part mail applications. In order to fix this the distribution lists in Outlook will need to be rercreated. However, using the imported contacts (selecting them when adding members to the groups) to create the new groups should work fine.

August 30, 2005 - Microsoft acquired Teleo, a VoIP provider with software and services that enable from PCs to traditional phones. Microsoft plans to incorporate and expand the service integrating it into MSN services. They are ultimately going deliver new VoIP consumer applications in future releases of MSN Messenger. You an read the press release and sign up for the beta program at teleo.msn.com.

Looks like MSN is going to start trying to compete with Skype and get “one-up” on GoogleTalk. I can also see MS integrating the software capabilities of this technology into Office Communicator and Live Communications Server, while offering a subscription to the VoIP services, of course. This will be intersting to see where this heads, especially since Microsoft is trying to play more in the “subscription” based software field. Comments?

Looks like MSN is readying a new home page. It looks like only a layout concept at this point, the functionaility is not working yet for the most part. You can see it here http://x.beta.msn.com/. While it looks a bit cleaner than the current MSN home page, its not a nice as the experimental www.start.com page. Actually it’s starting to look more like yahoo.com with the new header bar with the topic categories and the ayout of the areas.

I would like to see them get to get to a “clean” feeling page like www.google.com/ig has, or even the start.com page.

I just found this post on designing Active Directory. Very simple and interesting way to do an AD design. https://blogs.technet.com/fsmo/archive/2004/06/23/164406.aspx. From a high-level perspective t should work, from a lower level design standpoint… I wish it was really this simple.

I have some ‘best practices’ which I have written up and published to this site based upon my experiences as well. Check them out.

Here the short of the post:

Other points:

Yesterday a rumor was going around on the blogosphere that Google was getting ready to launch it’s instant messaging and VOiP client. Apparently this was reported in the LA Times. Today Google launched GoogleTalk Beta. The location to get the beta client is at www.google.com/talk/.

The client is a very small download and the interface is really, really clean. You do need to have a gmail account in order to use GoogleTalk. If anyone wants a free invite to gmail let me know, I have a lot of them to give away.

And if your interested, it looks like GoogleTalk is based upon the OpenSource “Jabber” technology which is an XML-based messaging protocol and provides great fault tollerance on the server side. Google is has really been leveraging OpenSource technology to get a jump start in the areas in which the want to play. This is the same thing that they did with Google Video, where they leveraged the VideoLAN OpenSource code and adapted it to their network services. Looks like this strategy is working well for them and problably saving them a lot of money compared to writing all of these services from scratch such as in closed proprietary systems.

The only disadvantage I see would be that it would be realativly easy for a new player to come into the market, using the same strategy in developing the same types of services, and competing with them. As long as their core search technology stays in the lead I don’t think this would be a great possibility though. Because in the end, it’s still the search results that keep people using Google and any other “add-ons” they are developing.

Windows Small Business Server 2003 w/ SP1- Exchane POP3 Connector is not retrieving email from the ISP.
Exchange users can send/recieve internal email and send email to the Internet. When the Exchange POP3 connector runs it successfully authenticates to the ISP’s POP3 mail server, checks for mail, does not download the POP3 mail, but deletes it from the ISP mail server.

If you change the POP3 Connector use use the maximum logging level under the Connector Troubleshooting tab, it will detail the mail connection/retrieval process. It will show successful authentication, and will show retriving 0 of 0 mail messages. As well you might see the following event logged:

If you check the POP3 account via the ISP’s webmail before the connector runs you will see messages in the users mailbox. Once the connector runs to retrieve the mail, the mail is deleted from the ISP’s mail server and NOT delievered to the Exchange user.

It appears that SBS2003 with SP1 applied requires the Recipient Update Policy to contain the outside smtp domain of what the pop3 accounts are using. The resolution for this is found in KB842293.

The interesting thing about this issue is that it doesn’t seem to affect SBS2003 without SP1. Or maybe it’s just an unusaul issue that doesn’t always show itself in SBS2003 deployments. I would recommend not using a POP3 connector when possible. The ideal SBS2003 deployment will have Exchange setup to recieve email from the Internet directly, although this may not always be possible with smaller businesses.

Additional POP3 Connector trobuleshooting help is in Microsoft KB885685.

The president of Network Solutions, Champ Mitchell, did an interview with C|net and compared his company with godaddy. Apparently the guy had some bad data in what he provided to C|net about customer base and registration comparisons between NetSol.net and GoDaddy.com. Bob Parsons, the founder/CEO of The GoDaddy Group gives his reply to the interview and makes some ‘corrections’ to the data Champ provided C|net and also makes some great cost/benifit comparisons of the services offered by netsol and godaddy.

I personally have used registration services from Network Solutions, Register.com, OpenSRS(Tucows), and GoDaddy.com. I registered my first domain in 1994 with Network Solutions (the only game in town at the time), in order to pay the registration fee at that time, it felt like you had to apply for a second mortgage. About 6 years ago I began registering all new domains for myself and my customers through Register.com which I liked at the time. I have given enough money to Network Solutions in the past for what they provided in return. The a few years ago I moved all of my doamins to GoDaddy.com and have no regrets about it. GoDaddy provides great services, an easy to use control panel where you can manage all your domains and easily get to your hosted web site configuration and your DNS manager. The prices are awesome, and you get ‘more’ than you pay for, especially compared to what their competition is doing. I would recommend GoDaddy to anyone who is looking for domain registrations, web hosting, SSL certs and anything else they provide.

Here are some discount codes for GoDaddy.com if you are interested.

I installed Microsoft OneCare. What One Care Provides:

The idea is that you get “green” and stay “green”. There is an icon in the system tray which shows the status of gren, yellow, red. When you complete all of the maintenance in OneCare and are Up to date it stays green.

The intereface is easy to understand and use. Although the more tech savy probably won’t be too interested in using OneCare, it would be a good fit for the home user or person who doesn’t want to have to remember to perform maintenance tasks such as scan disk, defrag, AV updates, backups,etc.

Really what OneCare is providing is a central maintenace application and Anti-Virus. You can manually run defrag, check disk, backups and you can even use task scheduler to automatically run all of the same functions/maintenance tasks OneCare provides. Although for the average user it may be a good idea.

I can’t see Microsoft charging a lot for this service though since all it really provides is a enhanced user shell and AV. If the pricing is in the ‘range’ of puchasing a third party AV applicaiton they will probably be very successful with it, iff it’s much more than that, well… I don’t see it being much more than something they would give away for a free 3-month subscription with a new PC (or Windows Registration/Activiation) and then hoping 10% of home users sign up. Now if they include with with their MSN online services for a couple of extra $ a month I could see that model working too.

What I really want to see is Microsoft offering their AV product which is included in OneCare as a stand alone product. That would be nice to have one vendor to call for support on everything. Although a debate could be started on the Wizdom of using a single vendor for OS and AV services. Comments??

In troubleshooting Citrix client connections always check that license services are running for both Citrix and MS TS Licensing. If there is a corrupt MS TS License database or the service on the TS licensing server is not started, the Citrix client connections do not provide errors that lead you to a license issue.

Older Citrix client will refresh the application set and display user icons just fine. When a user attempts to launch an application, the connection icon in the task bar will appear and then disappear with no notofication or error. Te client log file will show blah,blah,blah “CONNECTED” then the next line will be blah,blah,blah “DISCONNECTED”. The newer Citrix clients will tell you there is a communication error with the Citrix server, but will behave the same way as the older client.

If this is happening on your network, check the MS TS License Service. Make sure it is running and you can open the MMC and see the licesnes, and verify there are enough licesnes available. Once this is done, the connections will work again.

Hopefully Citrix will someday provide alerts and log information that will actually clue you in on the problem from the Client aspect.

The Lazy Admin has a post about weighting domain controllers for logon preference. This is helpful if you need to optimize your logins in relation to the processing capability of your DC’s. http://thelazyadmin.com/index.php?/archives/163-Weighting-Domain-Controllers.html