Category Archives: IT

Bye bye XP…

xpipfilter… and did we have fun with you. One of those was the TCP/IP filtering option. Just configure it to deny all traffic and what you got was a box that would get an IP address through DHCP and then denied all traffic towards the network. Do that to an unsuspecting helpdesk employee (who forgot to lock his or her desktop) and a world of joy unfolds…

Anyway after a longer than usual lifespan it is time to look somewhere else now.

Android Mail vs Exchange

Ran into an issue that the native mail client couldn’t be configured on an Android device (specifically a Galaxy S4 from Samsung with either a version 4.3 or 4.4 of Android on it). The server it should connect to is an older Exchange 2007 environment (UR11 at the time this was happening). When trying it always ended up with the remark that the supplied username and password where invalid. Looking into the configuration of the mail client there is a DeviceID mentioned starting with SEC and then a certain amount of hexadecimal numbers, while in Active Directory I found a DeviceID that started with androidc. Through the aid of powershell I added the SEC DeviceID as found in the mail profile of the phone, waited a few moments and then applied the settings again and this time it picked it up and is working. Below is a small script to add a DeviceID into Exchange if you have the same issue, just supply the Exchange Alias together with the DeviceID from the phone and it might work for you too. If it is more permanent I’ll update it with a nicer version that includes error handling and comments. Needless to say there needs to be some time spend on why this is happening.

$Alias = Read-Host "Exchange Alias ......... : "
$DevID = Read-Host "New ActiveSync Device ID : "
$DData = (Get-CASMailbox -Identity $alias).ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs
$DData = $DData+$DevID
Set-CASMailbox -Identity $Alias -ActiveSyncAllowedDeviceIDs $DData
Write-Host "Written ActiveSyncDeviceID $DevID to alias $alias."

Interprocess Communications Depot?????

….. What’s that? Well the full error I was getting when trying to install a Cisco AnyConnect VPN client (2.5 or 3.0) is “The VPN client agent was unable to create the interprocess communications depot.”. The only thing I could do is just cancel the installation and then click away the error message. Still do not know what the above actually is but didn’t look for it either. When you have this error during an installation of the above mentioned software check your networkcard configuration to see if Internet Connection Sharing is enabled. If it is enabled please disable as it is preventing the VPN client from installing correctly. From the same person that came with this problem was also the remark that the installed version of the VPN client gave an error that it had problems with a network gateway, but didn’t have the exact error. The idea is clear though, do not enable ICS.

Issues mounting a memory stick in VM-Ware Player?

…… Did you turn on Virtualization Support in the BIOS? Had an issue with a laptop that ran a XP system virtually on a physical Windows 7 laptop. All was well however if you wanted to mount a USB stick to the VM it would end up with a driver error. The exact message is “The connection for the <Name of USB Device> was unsuccessful: Driver Error”. Googled it but couldn’t really find what I was looking for, lots of errors regarding device in use and others. Decided to check if Virtualization Support was turned on within the BIOS and found it disabled, enabled the support and immediately the mounting of a USB stick into the VM is now working fine. This most likely will go for USB based harddrives or other devices that will mount as a drive as well and might also apply to other operating systems that you’ve virtualized. Next is testing this with an ODB2 dongle with software that only is supported on Windows XP (as that was the driver for having a VM).

LDAP import on Blue-Mind 2.0.8

LDAP import into Blue-Mind 2.0.8 on Ubuntu 12.04LTS and maybe other Debian based installs as well.

Did an out of the box install of Blue-Mind 2.0.8 on a server to start investigating if Blue-Mind could replace my current Exchange Server install as it had the basics which are calendaring and activesync support for mobile devices, but found out that it couldn’t do the ldap-import according the instructions found here.

Blue Mind

It seems that the package website can be browsed as a directory so I went looking for the plugin name as that was mentioned on their community pages.

So, if you want to do LDAP imports on your Ubuntu 12.04LTS server within Blue-Mind you can do so with the following two commands:

wget “http://pkg.blue-mind.net/2.0.8/precise/main/bm-plugin-core-ldap-import_2.0.9987_amd64.deb
dpkg -i bm-plugin-core-ldap-import_2.0.9987_amd64.deb

You will need to use sudo of course and then restart Blue-Mind, after which you now have the “Directories” tab added as shown in the Blue-Mind knowledge base article mentioned above. However how to add it was missing in the knowledge base, or at least I never found it. Also it might be possible that it does install if you run OpenLDAP on the same server which was not so in my case. Hope this might help you out if you are struggling with the same issue.

ownCloud, resolve your Dropbox issue

owncloudSomehow I doubt that, but it will be the next experiment. Clients for Linux, MacOSX and Windows but also Android and iOS. The mobile ones are paid, currently going for € 0.79. For an experiment this is still affordable :-).

The features seem impressive, so lets give it a go. A dropbox clone that comes at 79 cents for the Android bit with storage limits that I can set myself is always welcome….. Bye bye dropbox or better yet, include it in ownCloud which seem to be a possibility.

reCaptcha

A nice way of translating books as you can see on their website and in the meantime deliver some kind of protection and as a benefit you aren’t completely wasting your seconds when typing them in to verify you are human.

My mail address is easily guessed but I will include the reCaptcha links for both Sunny’s and my own mail address for people with a shortage in braincapacity.

You can try on our Contact Us page.