removing password change requirement on Office365

By default, Office365 forces you to change your password every three months.  Should you want to keep Office365 from forcing you to change your password every three months, these instructions will help:

Follow steps 1 through 4 here:
http://www.christiano.ch/wordpress/2012/03/28/office-365connect-to-msonline-using-powershell/

This gets you to the powershell for your account.  Now, you need to enter the command to disable the password change requirement.

The command is:

Get-MsolUser | Set-MsolUser -PasswordNeverExpires $true

It looks like this:

It doesn't give you any confirmation, but it works.

SBS 2008 - An internal transport certificate expired

On one of my SBS 2008 servers, I was getting this event log error 2 years after I built it:

EVENT # 2048076
EVENT LOG Application
EVENT TYPE Warning
OPCODE Info
SOURCE MSExchangeTransport
CATEGORY TransportService
EVENT ID 12015
COMPUTERNAME   SERVERNAME
DATE / TIME   5/19/2012 10:57:55 AM
MESSAGE An internal transport certificate expired. Thumbprint:98F05ABC27FEB37D5C156FD7E9FFBFFC0B098288

I had a 3 year UCC Exchange certificate on this server that IIS, POP, IMAP, and SMTP were using.  But for some reason, this "internal transport certificate" was using a self signed certificate.  It seems as though the solution was as simple as running "New-ExchangeCertificate" from the Exchange Shell.  I had already run this to replace my internal certificate, but here's what it looks like when you run the command, it prompts you to overwrite the SMTP certificate for internal processing (noting that the 3rd part SSL cert takes precedence for external communications).

moving autocomplete data on Outlook 2010

Good post on moving the Outlook 2010 autocomplete data from computer to computer:

http://benosullivan.co.uk/windows/how-to-copy-auto-complete-in-outlook-2010/

AT&T Uverse error on google - 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /cgi-bin/redirect.ha was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

One of my clients recently changed their internet service to AT&T UVerse. AT&T (in San Francisco) says they are no longer offering DSL, only UVerse. After setting up UVerse, one of my users was getting this error in Firefox when going to www.google.com:

404. That’s an error. The requested URL /cgi-bin/redirect.ha was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

She got a similar error when going to www.yahoo.com. After some research, this seemed to be a common theme in Uverse. I resolved this by clearing the cache in Firefox:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/How%20to%20clear%20the%20cache

Annoying, but easy fix. Of note - she did not have this issue on IE 9. Just Firefox 11.

removing 6to4 adapters in Windows 7

I was working on a client machine that was having trouble acessing network drives. I did an ipconfig and found 200+ network adapters. After some research, it seemed there was an issue with having multiple 6to4 network adapters and they were screwing up the machine's networking.

I followed this blog post for the automation of the removal using devcon:

http://www.ryanvictory.com/posts/automating-6to4-adapter-removal-in-windows/

The automated method took probably 3 seconds to remove each 6to4 adapter, so it wasn't fast, but it was easy.

configuring company URL for Office365 webmail

There's a lot of misinformation I've found on creating a custom URL that goes to Office365 webmail.

You can always go to:

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

But if you want to create a custom URL with your company URL, you can simply create a CNAME record that points to Outlook.com

So if your domain name was xyz.com and you'd like mail.xyz.com to go to your Office365 webmail, you'd configure a CNAME record for mail that points to outlook.com

generic Windows icons for Office apps (in this case Office 2007 on Windows 7)

I've seen this twice and fixed it the same way both times. On the user's desktop, he/she has generic Windows icons instead of the typical Word or Outlook icons in the taskbar. Here's what that looks like:

I've been able to fix it each time with a batch file I found. Since I can't attach the batch file to this post, I'll put the text of the file here, since it's short:

@echo off

cls

echo The Explorer process must be killed to delete the Icon DB.

echo Please SAVE ALL OPEN WORK FIRST

pause

taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F

echo Attempting to delete Icon DB...

If exist %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db goto delID

echo Previous Icon DB not found...trying to build a new one

goto :main

:delID

cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local

del IconCache.db /a

pause

echo Icon DB successfully deleted

goto main

:main

echo Windows 7 must be restarted to rebuild the Icon DB.

echo Restart now? (Y/N):

set /p choice=

If %choice% == y goto end

echo Shutdown aborted...please close this window

explorer.exe

:end

shutdown /r /t 0

exit