sending as an alias on an Exchange server

There's no easy way to send as one of your aliases on an Exchange server. Let's say your primary email address is dave@abc.com with two aliases of helpdesk@abc.com and dave@xyz.com. Logic would say that you could add the FROM field in your Outlook message and put in one of your aliases. Well, this doesn't work.

There are two workarounds to allow you to send as your aliases. I'll describe them both and give links on how to implement them:

1) create a POP3 account in the local Outlook that does not ever actually POP anything and uses the SMTP info for the Exchange server and the email address for the alias

http://www.messageops.com/office-365-tools-resources/sending-as-secondary-alias-in-microsoft-exchange-online/

2) create a distribution list with a single member (the user). Assign send as permissions to that mailbox for the user and then the user can use the FROM field. The down side is that you might be adding many different fake distribution lists for each time a user needs to send as an alias.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/02/23/notes-from-the-field-support-for-multiple-aliases.aspx

Both solutions are lame, but I'll be implementing option 1 from this point forward.

installing Entourage 2008 EWS and getting error

I had a user with Entourage 2008 and needed to install Entourage 2008 EWS (Exchange web services edition) to work with a new Exchange 2010 server. However, each time we tried to install it, we got this error:

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You cannot install Entourage 2008, Web Services Edition on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.

To learn how to fix this issue, see "I can't install Office 2008 for Mac updates" at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/help.mspx.

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What I found was that you need install the version of Entourage EWS for the specific version of Entourage you have. If you have Entourage 12.2.3, you need to install Entourage EWS 13.03. But if you have a newer or older update of Entourage on your system, you need a newer or older version of Entourage EWS. It's very lame, but based on the version of Entourage you have, you need a certain version of EWS.

In my case, I was on the most recent version of Entourage, so I needed the most recent version of EWS (13.0.11 as of the time of this post), which is the case most people should find themselves in. First, run Microsoft autoupdate and get your Office 2008 up to the newest version. The go to the Microsoft for Mac downloads page here:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads

Click on Office 2008. Click on Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition. This will take you to the download for the most recent version of Entourage EWS, which should be compatible with your Entourage if you have it up to date. Download and install and you're ready to go.

sending over port 587 with SSL on SBS 2003

When configuring external users to send over port 587 on Exchange/SBS 2003 - in the scenario that you have users that need to POP the server for whatever reason - here is what I think is the best way to do it:

In Exchange System Manager, go to Servers -> Server Name -> Protocols -> SMTP -> Default SMTP Virtual Server

Right click on the Default SMTP virtual server and choose properties.

Click on advanced and click add. Enter 587 in the TCP port and hit OK. It'll look like this when done:

Click on the access tab. Click on Certificate.

Put your existing 3rd party SSL certificate in place on this virtual server. This must be a 3rd part SSL certificate (like godaddy).

And that's it.

When configuring the email client, tell it to use authentication and SSL over port 587. In Outlook 2007, use AUTO for the type of encryption.

turning on virtualization assistance in the BIOS

I built my first virtual servers this week, which I will write about later. There was one trick that got me at first.

In this case, I'm using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 on a Dell PowerEdge T310.

When I started the first VM, the system told me the hypervisor was not running. One of the things the error told me was that I should make sure that virtualization assistance was enabled in the BIOS. First, I made sure that virtualization was supported for my processor - a Xeon X3430 - which it was. Then I went into the BIOS and found indeed that virtualization was turned off.

After that, I was ready to go.

free tracking software for stolen laptops - preyproject

An acquaintance recently had a stolen laptop, and I was very surprised to find that she had installed a free laptop tracking program on it. I viewed the tracking report from the program/service, and it was incredible.

The service showed the location on a google map of the laptop. It showed a screen shot of the desktop of the laptop. It even showed the a capture from the built in web cam of the person using the laptop. This service/program has a free option which seems to be fully functional, but it also has a paid version with more features. In the case of this laptop theft, the free version was sufficient.

The site for the service and program is:

http://preyproject.com/

I have already installed this on my own laptop.

421 4.3.2 Service not available, closing transmission channel on SBS 2008 - not receiving external email

Yesterday, I had an extremely frustrating issue where my SBS box was not receiving external email. Port 25 was open. I could telnet to the server from *inside* the LAN and get the proper banner, but when I was outside the LAN, I could get:

421 4.3.2 Service not available, closing transmission channel

In the end, my conclusion is that while troubleshooting another issue, I ran the fix my network wizard which deleted my receive connector for external email. There should be 3 receive connectors by default - one for sharepoint, one for internal users to use for sending mail and internal mail, and one for receiving external email from the outside.

This is a proper looking set of receive connectors:

This is what the internal connector should look like for internal usage:

This is what a proper external/internet receive connector should look like:

Default SBS login page and Outlook Anywhere not working on SBS box

The other night, I installed some updates on an SBS 2008 server and rebooted it. In the morning, no users could connect to Outlook via RPC over HTTP (Outlook Anywhere). In the end, I found that the binding had changed on some virtual web sites in IIS and some built in SBS web sites were broken.

I found that the default web site was bound to 443 which made the SBS web applications web site appear as stopped. This is what the default web site binding should look like:

I found that two of these sites said "offline"

And this is what the bindings on SBS Web Applications should look like:

I adjusted the bindings, and then I was ready to go. I have no earthly idea why the bindings changed. It wasn't the updates. They were standard Windows updates. So odd.