I’ve been bitten by this one in the past and should have learnt my lesson by now, but laziness disguised as efficiency continues to drive me.

Notepad DOESN’T always sanitise text pasted from other applications, and whilst all appears well on-screen, whatever you’re trying to do just WON’T work.

A couple of weeks ago it was Lync not actioning the (pasted) settings in my Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt file.

Today it’s an NET VX1200 UC Gateway failing a manual test of the AD lookup functionality – but the user is DEFINITELY in AD, there are no spaces in the number, we’re replicated, etc etc.

<nodename># ad-get
Active Directory update completed successfully. 1234 AD user entries are cached.

<nodename># ad-dump telephoneNumber=+61212345678 all
Value: 'all' not found or Active Directory feature is not licensed.!

I’d pasted the “ad-dump” command from a Word document into a Telnet window in my RDP session. All looked well on screen, and the command repeatedly came out of the VX’s command buffer without issue. This example doesn’t use quotes, so none to have been mucked-up with fancy quotes, but it steadfastly refused to provide the expected output. Re-keyed it and it was all a source of joy.

Moral of the story: when it’s just NOT making sense, re-key the line (file?) you’ve pasted from scratch.

– G.