Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How to add a MSN contact to your communicator contactlist

If your company had an OCS edge server deployed, one of the possible options is use Public Instant Messaging Connectivity (PIC).

PIC enables your company to chat with MSN, Yahoo & AOL users. I don't have contacts using Yahoo or AOL, but I do have msn-contacts.

When you add a contact outside your domain (MSN or federated) OCS will see this address as a federated contact and start a search for the according domain. This works fine if the contact uses federation or when you MSN-contact is registered with a hotmail.com, Live.com or MSN.com domain. But it will fail if the contact is registered with another (mail)address.

In order to fix this, you need to change the address, i.e.:
Pietje.puk@thenetherlands.com has to be changed into Pietje.puk(thenetherlands.com)@msn.com

The domain MSN.COM will translate this back into the original address and warns the msn-contact that somebody wants to chat.

By default, the contact you add will get Access Level 'Public'.

Completing the list:
Pietje.puk@thenetherlands.com --->> Pietje.puk(thenetherlands.com)@msn.com
Pietje.puk@hotmail.com --->> Pietje.puk@hotmail.com
Pietje.puk@live.com --->> Pietje.puk@live.com
Pietje.puk@msn.com --->> Pietje.puk@msn.com

Suc6

Friday, April 24, 2009

Access Edge service terminated with service-specific error 3286842466 (0xC3E93C62)

This morning, a friend of me and former colleague deployed an OCS 2007 R2 environment with an OCS Edge.

The customer should take care of the according firewall rules.

After completing the deployment, he was unable to start up all the OCS Edge services. He got the following error:
  • Failed starting the protocol stack. The service has to stop
    Error code is:0xC3E93C62 (SIPPROXY_E_NO_DEFAULT_OUTGOING_CERT).Cause: Check the previous entries in the event log for the failure.
In the Event log he found the corresponding error:
  • The Office Communications Server Access Edge service terminated with service-specific error 3286842466 (0xC3E93C62).
When he studied the corresponding certificate, he found the path to the Certificate Revocation Lists Url: http://crl.geotrust.com/crls/secureca.crl

He tried to open the page from the Edge as well from the ISA firewall, but failed.

After re examin the firewall rules he learned that the customer did not set the outbound firewall rule to download certificate revocation lists.
The rule has the be configured as:
  • External
  • Local Port: 80 HTTP.
  • Direction: Outbound (to download certificate revocation lists).
  • Remote Port: Any.
  • Local IP: The external IP address of the Access Edge service.
  • Remote IP: Any IP address.
When he applied the rule, he was able to start the Access Edge service and tested with success Open Federation.

OCS Certified

Last week I went for my OCS Exam TS: 70-638 and I was able to pass the exam. :-)

It took a while, but finally i'm OCS certified.

Next week I will follow the Voice Ignite training in Amsterdam (NL), which will be given by Steven van Houttum.

Let´s hope they will do a lot of R2 features.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Import-Mailbox cmdlet gives statuscode -2147221219

For a customer I had to create a method for importing multiple PST-files into a new Exchange Server 2007 Environment. The PST-files were already exported with ExMerge from Exchange Server 2003.

If you want to import mailboxes I usualy use the cmdlet 'Import-Mailbox'. This cmdlet is part of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Shell. For more information on how to use this cmdlet, visit this site.

When I started the import, it throws me the following error:
StatusCode : -2147221219
StatusMessage : Error occurred in the step: Approving object. An unknown error has occurred.
ReportFile : C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Logging\MigrationLogs\import-Mailbox20090209-103301-5655000.xml

I tried to import another PST-file but I got the same error as mentioned above. I figured out is was a consistent error. To troubleshoot this i checked the following possibilities:
  • I can open the mailbox on the server with an Outlook-client
  • I have the correct credentials on the users mailbox
  • I have the correct credentials on the Exchange Server having the MailboxRole.
  • I googled the error. Plenty of hits with many solutions, but none according to the above error.
  • I looked at the ReportFile. A lot of XML-code and the same error as mentioned above, but it explains nothing.
  • I exported the empty mailbox and I imported again. No errors.
Non of the above gave me a clue.

Then I ran the cmdlet with the '-debug' option so I could figure out at wich step the import went wrong. This opens my eyes.

During the step 'Approving object' the cmdlet opens the PST-file and tries to get access to the objects (mail/calender/etc.) within the PST-file. If the action succeeds, the objects wil be moved (read copied) to the mailbox on the server. For some reason, the PST-file couldn't be opened.

Opening the PST-file with my Outlook-client shows an empty mailbox (the file is about 800MB) and I was not questioned to give up a password.

Than, I decided to import my own PST-file into the mailbox and it gave no error.
Ok. Let's put password protection on my own PST-file and start the import again.

Bingo! I got the same error as above. It looks like the PST-files were exported with the option 'with user password'.

After I got a new export the import did not give any errors anymore.