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.
Continue reading ‘Derailed by invisible characters from a Paste operation’ »
If you’re shopping around for a spare port to use (for, ooh, say, a new Lync csTrustedApplication), the quick way to test if your chosen port is already in use is:
netstat –a | findstr <port>
Thanks to Jeff Schertz for this tip.
I’ve recently worked on a couple of deployments where I integrated Lync with Exchange 2010 SP1.
I refer to a couple of blogs for this process, and whilst I love Ilse Van Criekinge’s Weblog, it’s all screen-captures and no scrapable text to make it easy to reproduce.
I’ve since found the process and text on Jeff’s EXPTA site to be more to my liking, and it works to boot!
Continue reading ‘Integrating Lync & Exchange 2010 SP1 OWA’ »
I stumbled across this one recently and thought it worthy of a re-post.
I was trawling the Lync “dbanalyze.exe” tool in the Lync ResKit as you do (I couldn’t sleep) and stumbled across a way of ascertaining a user’s Conference Id and dial-in code.
I thought this might come in handy at some stage if you REALLY need to fake-up a meeting request to a third party’s conference (poor-man’s delegation?), or gate-crash either the on-line component, or just dial in.
Continue reading ‘Gate-crash (or Spoof?) a Lync User’s Conference’ »
I recently learnt to my combined irritation and eventual delight that even if your phone numbers are perfectly formatted as E.164 in AD, you still need a rule in “Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt” that (effectively) normalises them – even though they already are. (Read that saga here).
But it dawned on me shortly thereafter that if Lync’s filtering ALL numbers in AD – and even your msRTCSIPLine – through “Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt”, perhaps I can turn the rules to my benefit?
Continue reading ‘Tweaking “Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt” for fun and profit’ »
Down here in the Banana Republic we sometimes fall into traps when localising foreign products (in this context those of Microsoft) to our regional preferences.
OCS and Lync are no exception. (I have some vague recollection of being unable to install the first release of OCS on an original Server 2008 machine if you’d dared to change the locale from “US”, and similar issues with R2 Group Chat if you’d changed the SQL Language from “[US]English”).
I’ve never really hit it off with the OCS and Lync Address Book. I don’t know I did, but the ABS took a dislike to me long ago that remains to this day.
In the process of chasing some Lync ABS strangeness (like where a contact and their details are present in an “Abserver.exe –dumpfile”, but refuse to offer themselves to a user) I found several posts that blamed my now estranged friend ABSConfig.exe. (Refer my earlier blog post on the subject, and other tales of woe from the Dr Rez site).
Continue reading ‘Lync 2010 Standard Edition & the SQL Management Studio’ »
I recently had a hard time getting the Lync Monitoring Server reports deployed.
The deployment process looked good, but I kept getting an error “Exception calling “Create” with “0” argument(s)”.
Continue reading ‘Errors Deploying Lync Monitoring Reports’ »
I was recently testing a Lync deployment prior to cutover, and as part of that process I needed to fail the SBA and the Front-End to ensure the users were all correctly re-directed to a SIP Registrar and that the “Limited Functionality … Outage” message displayed.
That all worked fine, but I was surprised to find that after reinstating the servers, my test user wasn’t able to join a Lync Meeting:
Continue reading ‘Lync: “The provided credentials are not authorized by the server”’ »