Wise Worm Blogs » Guides

iPhone Mail Exchange Server Support

Erik — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:10:48 +0000

I’ve been using the the iPhone mail app to sync my contacts, calendar and emails through exchange server. One thing I noticed was that there was no setting to limit the file size of every email received. Even if you set the email limiter on server side, the iPhone wouldn’t recognize it. This is very crucial especially to KB/bandwidth based data plans since every kilobyte cost money. After getting frustrated about it, I began to study the behavior of the iPhone mail app and realized that Apple automated everything to prevent users from making mistakes but sacrificed user control.

So how does it work?

WIFI

If your iPhone receives the email through wifi, the iPhone will automatically download any email below 1 MB (regardless of any setting like number of preview lines and etc). So if you have an email with 999KB worth of text and 800KB attachment file, iPhone will download them all even if you didn’t view the email. The number of attachments do not stack, it will download any attachment below 1MB and let you manually download beyond 1MB whether you like it or not.

3G/GPRS

If your iPhone receives the email through GPRS/Edge/3G, the iPhone will automatically download any email below 125KB. The difference here is that if the email content does not have any attachment and it is below 125KB, the iPhone will download it automatically even if you didn’t view the email. But if the email has an attachment, the iPhone will just download the header(will show the preview lines if set but will not download more than that). When you start to view the email with attachment, that’s the time where the iPhone starts downloading anything below 125KB. The rule is the same with wifi where the attachments do not stack up, each attachment will be checked if it’s under 125KB.

Hopefully I managed to give the iPhone mail users insights on how it works with exchange server.

KB974571 will break LCS 2007 r2

George — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:40:56 +0000

Today you came into your office and your phone rang endlessly. It seems that the entire company is trying to reach you because “THEY CANT SIGN IN TO THEIR COMMUNICATOR”.

You log in to your server and found that FRONT END service is STOPPED. You restarted the service but failed. Checked the EVENT LOG and found that an error Source: Schannel.

And dig futher and found these errors:
Source: OCS Server
Category: 1000
Event : 12290

You did a quick dnsflush and tried again to restart the service thinking that it might just be your certificate provider but no its dead. If you had this problem I have had it today.

Well lets get to the point. Browse to your EVENT log on your OCS / LCS and look for errors. If you have something like this:

Description:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: OCS Server
Event Category: (1000)
Event ID: 12290
Date: 10/16/2009
Time: 7:52:47 AM
User: N/A

Description:
The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 has expired. Please upgrade from the evaluation version to the full released version of the product.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Then whats causing this is KB974571 (MS09-056: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing) This update will cause the LCS or OCS server to show running with the evaluation version and then noting it as expired. Your Front End Server will indicate that it is stopped while other services is running. We ran LCS 2007r2 but i believe it applied to LCS 2005 as well.

Uninstalling the patch is the only way to currently fix this issue. Delaying the install of KB974571 is recommended.

Afterward rebooting your server will solves your problem momentarily.

IMPORTANT : DO NOT LET YOUR SERVER INSTALL THE UPDATE AGAIN TILL MICROSOFT GET THIS FIXED UP.

Otherwise everyone will ring your phone again. If your have WSUS you can decline/delay the update for install. I’m sure just like me it saved my day and now I can enjoy my cup of coffee again. I hope this saves your day too.

Show LastLogOnTime on Exchange 2007

George — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:57:54 +0000

While most organization works on Exchange 2003 for their email the move to the newer Exchange 2007 provides more functionality and benefits. Exchange 2007 not only provide a good looking EMC. But is packed with new cool features such as Unified Messaging, Message tracking Center and mailbox recovery and addresses also the limitation on the database size of your the previous Exchange 2003. Well theoretically it can go up to 16TB of Exchange database size surpassing the previous 75GB limit on your Exchange 2003. But I don’t think someone would want his database size to be 16TB that is way too much to handle. Ok All is going well until one day the CIO asked me to send him a list of people who are not reading their email. So I opened up my Exchange Admin console and went to the users mailbox node..and guess what. it is not there anymore.

What used to show up in Exchange 2003 under Mailbox Store>Mailboxes is not there anymore in Exchange 2007. In Exchange 2003 thru the EMC you will find and can even export these information see figure below.

Fig 1. Exch2003
By navigating to the Mailboxes Node

You will be presented with the LasLogOnTime
But it is not the case with Exchange 2007. You will need to hustle your skill a little bit on Power shell . Yes you heard me right Power shell. So I need to brush up my typing again. Well its a little pain but once you get to have the feel of it its a great new tool to manage your Exchange 2007. After all the things you click on your EMC fires up a PS command.

So fire up the Exchange Management shell. And type in the following :

To display the entire exchange organization run
Get-MailboxStatistics -Server servername

To display a particular user LasLogOnTime run
Get-MailboxStatistics username | list LastLogOnTime

To dump to a text file you can dump it into a text file or an HTML filel by
providing the appropriate output extensions.
Get-MailboxStatistics -Server servename | out-file textfilename.txt
Get-MailboxStatistics -Server servename | out-file textfilename.html

These commands on PS ( Power shell ) will not only show you the LastLogOnTime date on a user mailbox but will also show other statistics on a user mailbox. You can display it on screen or dump it to a text/html file and submit it to your boss.

Hope it helps

Removing Conficker/Downadup Virus

Mark — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:32:48 +0000

Conficker (A.K.A. Downadup) virus is a computer worm that does irritating things to your computers. Although it doesn’t destroy your operating system, but it does so many things to a point that your computer becomes too slow to be usable.

The worm takes advantage of a bug in Windows that’s why it is able to infect a computer by just going through the network. You can also get infected through memory cards or USB thumb drives.

At the moment, it seems that infections of this worm from USB or memory cards were very rare and most of the infections we saw were coming from network.

To get rid of the worm, please follow these easy steps:

Download the Microsoft MSRT* which can be downloaded from this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD724AE0-E72D-4F54-9AB3-75B8EB148356&displaylang=en
Run the Microsoft MSRT* and follow the steps of the tool until it is complete
Run your favorite anti-virus software and do a full and complete scan of your hard drives for full removal of traces and prevent further infections

*MSRT = Malicious Software Removal Tool

Updated on March 24, 2009

Thanks George for pointing out another tool from Symantec. Here is to reiterate that another option and add it to our recommended tools for removing Conficker Worm. Below is the link to download:
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2009-011316-0247-99