Outlook 2010 show picture placeholders

This little setting cost me a few hours of time. I have no idea how it got messed up but I have the fix. The problem is e-mails wouldn’t show images, only boxes where the image is supposed to be. It took me just a few minutes to find the setting. With a message open click File -> Options -> Editor Options… -> Advanced -> Show picture placeholders. So I uncheck the box and the pictures show up in the e-mail. All is good until the next day when I start Outlook again and the setting is checked again. No matter what I do I can’t seem to get the setting to stay unchecked. Well here is the fix.

Migrate clients to a new DHCP server

We’ve decided to migrate our DHCP services off the domain controllers and onto a DHCP failover cluster.  We needed to find a way of getting the clients to migrate over without rebooting them and without the sledge hammer approach of turning off the old DHCP service.  We came up with a slow and safe method for forcing the clients to migrate with minimal impact.  

SharePoint 2010 warm up

We are just now getting ready to role out SharePoint Foundation 2010 on our network.  One thing that has always bothered me with SharePoint is how terribly slow it is when the first user hits the site.  After much research it seems most people use what’s called a warm up script to hit the sites.  As usual, nothing is ever easy.  Most of the scripts I found didn’t work.  

Exchange 2010 EMC and EMS are very slow

I’ve been working with a new installation of Exchange 2010 for the last couple weeks.  Today, I finally got tired of waiting so long for the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to start up on my management workstation.  This only happens because our network isn’t connected to the Internet.   The solution was to open Internet Explorer options advanced tab.  Scroll down to the Security section and uncheck “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation”.

I found the idea from this posting http://blogs.technet.com/b/nawar/archive/2011/06/03/exchange-2010-management-console-emc-is-very-slow.aspx but I didn’t need to uncheck the second setting he has there since we have a fully operational private PKI infrastructure in place.  This is safe for us to do in our environment because of our isolation.

 

Exchange Management Console tries to connect to an old server

In getting Exchange installed in our environment, I had to completely rip it out and start over.  I started with mail1 and mail2 servers running the CAS/HT/MBX roles but found that I would have needed a hardware load balancer for the CAS array.  After getting everything up and running in a proper configuration, I launched the Exchange Management Console from my admin workstation and the “Microsoft Exchange On-premises Server” fails to initialize because it’s trying to connect to the old mail1 server which doesn’t exist anymore.  I tried uninstalling the management tools from my workstation and re-installing them.  Still failed.  After a hour or so of looking around I finally found out how to fix this.  Delete the following key in the registry:  HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Exchangeserver\v14\AdminTools\NodeStructureSettings.

Restart the EMC and you’ll be good to go.

Exchange 2010 setup failure in a hardened DISA environment

I had the privilege of setting up a new exchange server on our network and ran into a failure.  During the Hub Transport installation the setup failed because the service wouldn’t start.  Apparently during the Active directory prep, a new group is created called Exchange Servers.  This group is given Manage Auditing and Security permissions on the Domain Controllers.  In our environment we have that setting specified in the Default Domain controllers policy to only allow the Auditors group.  As soon as that policy was refreshed it overwrote what the Exchange setup had done.  It took a while but I finally tracked this down with the help of two other blog postings.

http://jasonshave.blogspot.com/2010/04/dscenosuitablecdc-error-with-exchange.html

http://www.howexchangeworks.com/2010/07/exchange-2010-error-process.html

 

Beware the DMS59 connector on a video card

A while ago one of our team mentioned noticeable differences between his two monitors.  One was using DVI via a display port to DVI adapter and the other was connected with a VGA cable.  Because I know hardware is cheap and people are expensive I purchased some dual DVI video cards for our workstations.  These were purchased from the workstation manufacturer and are the half height cards needed for our small form factor systems.  They came in today and one of the team started installing it along with a dual DVI KVM.  The cards are ATI Radeon 6350 DMS59 cards that have a single DMS-59 connector with an adapter that splits the DMS-59 into two DVI connections.  For some reason he couldn’t even see the BIOS boot screen.  Hearing the problems one other person on the team and I gave suggestions as we went about our work.  Things like reconnecting the display port and going into the BIOS to disable the on-board video.  About 2 hours into this I decided to help out and started methodically going through troubleshooting steps.