2013-06-25 · 06:29

TechEd Europe: day 0

As I started writing this, I was in the back of a Delta MD-80 heading to Atlanta, thence to pick up Delta flight 109 to Madrid. The process reminds me in many ways of the first real set of international business trips I made, back in 2000-2002; Many aspects of the travel world have changed since then, but some have not.

For example, I have two laptops. Back in the day, I carried a ThinkPad for running Windows apps and a Powerbook for everything else. Now I’m taking my MacBook Pro because I need it to do demos in my TechEd session and my Dell-issued laptop because I need it for Dell work. All of the attendant weight, volume, and hassle constraints that come about from dual-wielding laptops are the same as they ever were.

Then there’s my cell phone. I have carried a Nokia 920 running Windows Phone 8 as my daily phone since November of 2012, and I am very happy with it. Unfortunately, AT&T wouldn’t SIM-unlock it for me, so I won’t be able to use it with a local SIM in Spain. That meant I had to dust off my iPhone 4, which is SIM-unlocked. I started using it last night and found it to be terribly clunky and slow compared to the 920. I don’t mean the data speed itself is slow, although it is; the phone UI itself is terribly slow compared to the 920. However, I like having iMessage available to chat with the many, many iOS users among my friends and contacts, and I am also toting my Pebble, which is completely unsupported and therefore essentially useless with Windows Phone. (Side note: I am eager to see what kind of Windows Phone announcements come out at Microsoft’s Build conference this week; I’m looking forward to more details on Nokia’s Amber and on Windows Phone Blue, or 8.1, or whatever it’s called now). So on balance, I’d have to say that the taking-a-US-cell-phone-to-Europe story is pretty much unchanged as well.

Delta surprised me with what’s known as an “operational upgrade,” or op-up, on the Atlanta-Madrid leg. That is, I didn’t buy a business class ticket, and I was not eligible for an upgrade based on my fare class, but Delta wanted to make more room in coach for paying passengers, and they had some empty business-class seats, so they moved me. I certainly wasn’t going to complain; this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an op-up and I was glad of it. I slept almost the entire way in the seat pod; by mashing buttons you can convert it into a narrow flat bed that ends up just about at floor level. The experience was oddly like sleeping in a mummy sleeping bag– the pod is only about 12″ at the footwell, and since I wear a size 13 shoe it was a bit of a tight fit.

We arrived on time at the Madrid airport, and I took a taxi to the hotel that Microsoft arranged for speakers, the Meliá Castilla. It’s gorgeous: very stately and European. Apparently it is near a bunch of nifty stuff but I was only there long enough to take a quick shower and catch a shuttle to IFEMA, the large conference center where TechEd itself is being held. I worked a shift at the “ask the experts” area and got a few good questions; more to say about that in another post. Then it was off to the speaker lounge to check my demos for tomorrow’s session. More to follow… 

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2013-06-25 · 06:13

Exchange 2013 Inside Out early access versions on sale

For a limited time, O’Reilly and Microsoft Press have the “early access” editions of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Connectivity, Clients, and Unified Messaging and Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability on sale for $19.99 each. This is a fantastic deal given that you get early electronic access to the books– I am still in the midst of working on my book, but you can get access to parts of it now to learn what you need to know, well in advance of its official on-sale date. The deal is good until 0500 PDT on July 3, so you have a bit of time to take advantage of it. (Note that the sale doesn’t apply to the bundle that includes both the print book and the early access electronic edition).

 

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2013-06-16 · 08:12

UM Call Router troubleshooting adventure

Yesterday I was in Redmond, teaching the UM portion of the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: Messaging class. This was the first rotation for this particular class, which replaces the MCM Exchange 2010 class, so I had all new content and an eager group of 14 motivated, smart MCSM candidates, including fellow MVP Michael van Horenbeeck, several people who I knew from online interactions (hi, Hany and Jerrid!), plus candidates from Germany, Israel, the US, Australia, and probably a few other places.

The teaching session went well, although my slides have a few lingering rough spots that I’ll need to polish. In this rotation we had a brand-new, and much improved, lab environment, so when Michael called me over to have a look at something my first thought was that it was a lab setup issue.

He couldn’t get the UM Call Router service to run after he’d enabled a certificate for it and set its startup mode to “dual”. These steps are required if you want to integrate Exchange UM with Lync, but they must be done in a specific order: first you change the startup mode with Set-UMCallRouterService (which will complain that you can’t enable secure SIP without a certificate!) and then you use Enable-ExchangeCertificate to assign the certificate.After he did so, the UM Call Router service stopped answering requests. When he ran netstat, he saw that it was listening on the IPv4 and IPv6 loopback addresses, but not on the assigned IPs for that server. The call router service had logged event ID 1621, which said that the UMCR couldn’t start because “the Client Access service was disabled.” This didn’t make a bit of sense, so we started digging.

First, I verified that no one else was having this particular problem—and they weren’t, so it seemed to be localized to Michael’s environment. Next I spent some time researching event ID 1621 on the intertubes, but that didn’t take long; the only two mentions I found were on TechNet, and the suggested solution was to reinstall Exchange. Nope, not gonna happen.

Michael had the bright idea to check the service component availability.. and it came back as “inactive”. However, the service was still running and would respond to telnet requests on port 5060 on the loopback address. This seemed very odd.

We ued Set-ServerComponentState to force the UMCR back into normal state, and it started listening on 0.0.0.0 again! So clearly the problem was that Managed Availability had killed off the service—now we started investigating why.

After a number of experiments, our theory was that because the UMCR couldn’t start in dual mode without a certificate assigned, so Managed Availability decided that it was unhealthy and marked its state as “inactive.” To test this, we ran Set-ServerComponentState to put the UMCR in maintenance mode; sure enough, the next time the service was probed, it unbound from 0.0.0.0 but remained bound to both loopback addresses. Forcing the service state back to healthy caused it to rebind to 0.0.0.0.

This leads me to point out a couple of things:

  • It strikes me as very odd that after Managed Availability marked the service as inactive that it kept running. I assume that this is on purpose; the service stays up so that Managed Availability can continue to probe it and keep its state updated.
  • The description for event ID 1621 is so bad it isn’t even wrong—the service wasn’t running because it couldn’t start with an unassigned certificate (and in fact, there was a separate event indicating exactly that). The problem had nothing to do with the (non-existent) client access service being disabled.
  • I didn’t see any events logged indicating that the component was in an unhealthy state, although I might have missed them. Once we’d fixed the binding problem, as we transitioned UMCR into and out of maintenance mode, we saw event ID 1648, indicating that the UMCR was returning to healthy state.

Clearly I still have a lot to learn about Managed Availability! I recommend starting with this blog post, which explains in more depth how you can find out what sort of mischief it may have committed on your unsuspecting services…

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2013-05-24 · 04:30

Transitions (or, “Dell, you’re getting a dude!”)

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post here titled simply “We’re moving to California.” Now I’m writing this post because… I’m moving back to Alabama.

I’m also switching jobs; effective June 3, I will be joining Michael Przytula‘s Global Communications and Collaboration team at Dell as a global principal consultant. My first project will be assisting a large automotive supply company with their migration from Lotus Notes to Office 365, so I’m jumping back into the Exchange world with both feet.

The reasons for these changes can be summed up simply: in order to be an effective father to my sons, I need to be where they are. For two years, I have been commuting faithfully at my own expense to see them every other weekend, plus one week per month during which Acuitus allowed me to work remotely. This has been a great experience in itself in many ways, but it has also been emotionally exhausting, physically tiring, and extremely expensive. The constant back-and-forth has made me at times feel like a visitor, not a father, and I’ve had to miss a great many milestone events because they happened at times when I wasn’t, couldn’t be, there.

Moving back was simultaneously a no-brainer (of course I need to be where the boys are!) and a very difficult decision to actually execute on. I believe that ultimately it is the right thing to do for my sons, so that’s what I’m doing.

As much as I believe that what Acuitus is doing is important and worthwhile, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the experience of living and working in California, and as hard a transition as it will likely be, it’s time for me to move on by moving back. I am optimistic and energized about working with Dell, and I am delighted by the prospect of being able to spend more, and better, time with the boys. Against that I have to weigh the upheaval, expense, and hassle of moving, the sadness of leaving valued friends and coworkers behind, and the feeling of unfinished business that comes from leaving Acuitus in the midst of our VA school project.

On balance, though, I am more optimistic than not… as I said back in 2009, it takes work. I still believe that’s true, and I’m going to put in the work that’s required. We’ll see what happens…

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2013-05-23 · 05:30

Thursday trivia #94

  • My heart goes out to all those in Oklahoma affected by the May 20 tornado. If you can help, please do.
  • Microsoft releases lots of documentation on how they do things for their internal network. Here’s an example: two papers on best practices for securing Active Directory.
  • I am delighted to report that a whole bunch of my students from the Navy school I helped run in Pensacola have been promoted to IT2. Well done.
  • You could pay $817 for this book on Amazon, or you could read the PDF for free: Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. Very well worth a look if you’re at all curious about programming. (Old guy note: I learned to program in Z80 assembly about… well, a long time ago.) It’s less than 50 pages.
  • Speaking of programming: this guy got a lot of press by writing a Wall Street Journal editorial saying that he’ll only hire people with some fundamental knowledge of programming: “Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You.” 
  • The boys and I saw Star Trek Into Darkness the other day. It was good, but I preferred the 2009 Star Trek better. I have high hopes for Man of Steel, though.
  • TechEd North America starts in less than two weeks! I’m putting the finishing touches on my slide deck and demos. If you’re there, stop by my session or the Ask the Experts booth and say “hi”.

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2013-05-22 · 21:15

Gun collecting, state by state

From my homeboy Pat Richard on Facebook, original source unknown:

You may have heard on the news about a southern California man put under 72-hour psychiatric observation when it was found he owned 100 guns and allegedly had (by rough estimate) 100,000 rounds of ammunition stored in his home. The house also featured a secret escape tunnel.

My favorite quote from the dimwit television reporter: “Wow! He has about a quarter million machine gun bullets.” The headline referred to it as a “massive weapons cache!”

By southern California standards someone owning 100,000 rounds would be called “mentally unstable.” Just imagine if he lived elsewhere:

In Arizona, he’d be called “an avid gun collector.”

In Arkansas, he’d be called “a novice gun collector.”

In Utah, he’d be called “moderately well prepared,” but they’d probably reserve judgment until they made sure that he had a corresponding quantity of stored food.

In Texas and Montana, he’d be called “the neighborhood ‘Go-To’ guy.”

In Alabama, he’d be called “a likely gubernatorial candidate.”

In Louisiana, he’d be called “an eligible bachelor.”

In North Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina he would be called “a deer hunting buddy.”

And, in Georgia, he’s just “Bubba” who’s a little short on ammo.

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2013-05-17 · 06:21

PIREP: my first “real” cross-country

Last weekend I took my first “real” cross-country flight. Executive summary: this is the one of the major reason I got a pilot’s license: fast travel, on my schedule, to do things that otherwise would be prohibitive. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine, but one with a practical side.

I recently earned my high-performance endorsement and got checked out in the Redstone Arsenal Flying Activity (RAFA) Cessna 182. This plane is bigger and faster than the Cessna 172 I’ve been flying. RAFA’s C182 is an older model, and the interior shows it, but it is mechanically in great condition, and it’s nicely equipped with a moving-map GPS and a decent autopilot. It can travel at up to about 145 knots, and its endurance is about 5 hours when fully fueled… longer than mine!

All of my XC time so far has been within California (with the exception of two short legs in the Mobile/Pensacola area early on in my training). The longest leg I’ve flown so far was Palo Alto-Bakersfield and back, a distance of about 220 miles. However, all of my flying so far has been casual. This was my first “real” XC: I had a defined mission, a longer distance, a time window to hit, and all my sons aboard. I’d aborted a previously planned trip on a similar route because the weather was just awful, so I was eager to make this trip if possible.

We’d planned to depart sometime Saturday morning. The forecast was for IFR until around 11am, gradually clearing. Sure enough, the morning started with IFR here in Huntsville, with low IFR (meaning even worse weather) further to the west along our planned route: direct from Redstone Arsenal Army Air Field (KHUA) to Jackson, Mississippi (KJAN) and then on to Alexandria (KAEX). By about 1pm it had cleared enough for us to head to the airport, but actually getting there took 3 tries as various kids remembered that they forgot important things such as contact lenses.

By the time we got to KHUA, visibility had improved to around 5mi but ceilings were still 3500′, which is low but manageable. I’d planned the flight to take place at 6500′, but that wasn’t gonna happen; however, the forecast called for higher ceilings further west, and I had a brand-new Stratus aboard for inflight weather, so we fueled and launched. After takeoff, we turned west on course and climbed to 2500′, where there were a few light bumps but nothing too serious. I noticed right off that the Stratus was connected but not displaying GPS or ADS-B data. Turning the iPad’s WiFi off and back on fixed it; it did this periodically throughout the trip, so I’ll have to figure out what’s going on. About halfway to KJAN were were able to climb up to 4500′, and things smoothed out considerably. There was a line of storms about 45nm to the south of our course, but they were moving NNE fast enough so that they were never a factor. Being able to see radar and METARs for en route airports on this leg was absolutely invaluable. At every point I had a good picture of what my options looked like if I needed them. Here’s what the Stratus data looks like when displayed in ForeFlight; The airplane icon displays our position from the Stratus onboard GPS; the green and blue dots represent airport weather results (tapping on the dot displays the detailed information), and the weather radar data is just like you’d see from a NEXRAD display.

IMG 0029

We landed at Jackson, taxiied to Atlantic Aviation, parked, and went inside. Nice FBO, friendly people… but key learning #1: check fuel prices beforehand! I am used to flying out-and-back legs from a single FBO, where I rent wet, and it didn’t occur to me that there might be dramatic price differences. After filling up at $6.90/gallon (with a club rental reimbursement rate of $5.11/gal), I now know better.

After a quick snack and a pee break, we loaded back up and took off for Alexandria. We were able to stay at 3000′ until about Vicksburg, when we asked for higher. Our arrival and descent into KAEX was smooth, but I had a sterile cockpit problem: the kids were bantering and I got distracted enough to begin an approach to runway 36 when I was cleared to runway 32. I caught the mistake in time, went around, and was lucky to have an understanding controller, but key learning #2: shut your passengers up as part of your descent checklist.

We parked at Million Air. They treated us like we’d rolled up in a Gulfstream. I am now a huge fan.  Unlimited soft drinks, popcorn, and soft serve ice cream? Why, yes, thank you. We needed it because, like a doofus, I’d neglected to pack any water for the flight. Key learning #3: if you pack snacks, pack drinks too, duh.

Our visit with the family was superb; we had a feast of BBQ chicken, got some great visiting time in with my mom, grandmother, uncle, and cousins, then got a good night’s sleep. Sunday we just relaxed and visited, at least until the 32 pounds of boiled crawfish arrived. After a delightful meal underneath a big tree in the backyard, it was time to head back to Million Air.

I’d planned a single leg back, without the Jackson stop, but on preflight noticed that the oil was lower than I’d like, and none of the Alexandria-area FBOs had 15W50. That necessitated another stop, and since I was familiar with Jackson I planned to stop there. (Key learning #4: carry spare oil. ) This worked out OK because the kids all needed a bathroom stop. I had filled up with fuel at Million Air ($4.81/gal), so I didn’t buy any fuel at Atlantic… so they charged me $20 for stopping by. I don’t think I’ll be back.

Coming back we were able to fly at 3500′ to just east of Alexandria, then 7500′ from there on out. Great, smooth ride with a beautiful view of the Mississippi River crossing, the flooded bottomlands near it, and all sorts of farm and agriculture happening beneath us. I started teaching David how to work the radios, and he did a creditable job (although I think there are some guys at Memphis Center wondering what kind of aircraft a “Skyliner” is).

I used the return legs to get some practice in driving the 530W and the autopilot; I am used to flying a G1000/GFC700 172 so the knobology is quite different. This particular 182 doesn’t have electric trim so I had to do a bit of trim wheel judo to keep the autopilot happy in altitude hold mode but it was good practice. While I love hand-flying, learning to use an autopilot effectively, in the right modes at the right times, is critical to safe single-pilot IFR operations, so I want to start getting better at it ASAP.

The eastern approach to KHUA crosses several restricted areas (some for drone flights, some over propellant storage areas), so we had to turn north, fly past the Decatur airport, then remain north of I-565 until we passed Huntsville International. We landed, refueled, hit Taco Bell, and poof! A trip for the books. 

The 182 burned about 13gph and gave me an average groundspeed of 133kts over 7.5hrs on the meter. While this isn’t exactly exciting compared to faster aircraft, it beats the hell out of driving, and it let the four of us deliver a great Mothers’ Day surprise. The kids enjoyed the visit and tolerated the cramped quarters pretty well, so we’ll be doing this run again soon.

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2013-05-14 · 10:25

Exchange 2013 Inside Out enters “early release” period

NewImage Lately I have been busy working on Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging. More precisely, I’ve been dividing my time between performing technical review on Tony’s book, Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Mailbox and High Availability, and writing new content for my book. It’s all Exchange, all the time! To be more precise, right now I am about 55% done with the book: the chapters on unified messaging, Lync integration, message hygiene, client management, and mobile device management are done, and I’m working on the transport chapter now. That leaves me with chapters on CAS, load balancing, and Office 365 yet to do– certainly enough to keep me busy!

Microsoft Press is offering an early access program for these books (and a number of others). If you buy the ebook now, you get immediate access to the parts of the book that have been completed (meaning they’ve been through at least the first part of the editorial pipeline), with access to the remaining chapters as they’re finished. When the entire book is released in its final form, you get an electronic copy of it as well. I’m excited to see Microsoft Press offering early access to the book, because all signs point to gathering interest in the practical aspects of deploying Exchange 2013– something both books talk about quite a bit. We are targeting the final version to cover SP1 when it’s released, so there will be updates to the early access versions as well.

Now, back to writing!

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2013-05-10 · 06:04

Taking pictures in the air

Last week, Doug Mahugh posted this great blog entry on taking pictures from commercial airplanes. He’s done some excellent work. I don’t usually take my real camera on commercial flights, but I think I’m going to have to start. In the meantime, here are two of my favorite airborne pics. I have some other great ones but my iPhoto library is so disorganized that finding them would take more time than I can spare at the moment.

DSC 0251 

the business end of a B-17

 

DSC 1188

en route to Petaluma; that’s Alcatraz in the foreground

 

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2013-05-09 · 05:28

Thursday trivia #93

Wow, lots of catching up to do. I’ve been writing a weekly set of notes for students at Acuitus’ school for veterans, and that’s taken all my Thursday material for the most part. It just dawned on me that I could have been posting those notes here too. Oops.

 

 

 

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2013-05-03 · 12:20

“There is always room for improvement” in aviation

Bonus double Flying Friday post today. Why? Because this article is too good not to share.

…these NASA pilots were always at 350 when needed. It wasn’t 349 or 351. They always flew on-speed. For me, sitting in the backseat for my first couple of missions in ACTIVE, a whole new skill level was revealed. They flew this way all the time. They were always on parameters. They were always on-altitude. No 34,900 ft or 35,100 ft for them. It was 35,000 ft and not a foot higher or lower.

The author goes on to talk about how this precision inspired him to fly more precisely– “Why not,” he asks, “endeavor to fly as perfectly as possible? In fact, why not endeavor to fly as well as you possibly can all the time, versus ‘just good enough’?”

Exactly. That’s what I want, and what I try to do.

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2013-05-03 · 06:40

Dealing with partial loss of power

Andy, my primary flight instructor, has always described a pilot’s license as “a license to learn”. This may sound trite, but it’s true… if you’re doing things the right way.

This week’s FLYING LESSONS newsletter contained an interesting factoid: the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says that partial loss of power is three times more likely than complete engine failure. After reading the report, I am forced to agree with Thomas Turner that partial-power operation is under-taught; I know that in my relatively limited experience none of the instructors I’ve flown with mentioned how to deal with it or even how to recognize it.

Recognition, of course, sounds like it should be pretty easy: is the engine making as much power as it should? In a car, you can tell by your forward speed and/or acceleration: does the car accelerate normally when you push on the accelerator? There are also audible cues that may tell you whether the engine is working normally. In an airplane, the same audible cues may exist, but airspeed and climb performance are just as useful as the sounds you hear. If you have fancy engine instrumentation, then it may give you information such as cylinder head temperatures that tell you what’s going on.

The ATSB report calls out a fairly straightforward procedure for dealing with partial power loss: lower the nose to maintain best glide speed, find a place to land, and do so as soon as practical. No turns under 200′, and no troubleshooting the engine unless you have sufficient altitude to do so. It also goes into some detail about potential causes of partial power loss, including spark-plug fouling, fuel contamination, and problems with carburetor heat. All of these are things I will be more mindful of as part of my preflight and in-flight operations.

Always something new to learn…

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2013-04-24 · 11:30

PC reliability: Apple, Dell, and lessons for servers?

Via Ed Bott, a fascinating article on real-world robustness from Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs: Want the most reliable Windows PC? Buy a Mac (or maybe a Dell). You should read the article, which outlines a report issued by Soluto, a cloud-based PC health and service monitoring company. Their report analyzes data reported to their service by customers to attempt to answer the question of which manufacturer’s PCs are the most reliable. Apple’s 13″ MacBook Pro comes out on top, with Acer’s Aspire E1-571 coming in second and Dell’s XPS 13 in third. In fact, out of the top 10, Apple has two spots, Acer has two spots, and Dell has five. Ed points out that it’s odd that Hewlett-Packard doesn’t have any entries in the list, and that Lenovo (which I have long considered the gold standard for laptops not made by Apple) only has one.

The report, and Ed’s column, speculate on why the results came out this way. I don’t know enough about the PC laptop world to have a good feel for how many of the models on their list are consumer-targeted versus business-targeted, although they do include cost figures that help provide some clues. There’s no doubt that the amount of random crap that PC vendors shovel on to their machines makes a big difference in the results, although I have to suspect that the quality of vendor-provided drivers makes a bigger difference. Graphics drivers are especially critical, since they run in kernel mode and can easily crash the entire machine; the bundled crapware included by many vendors strikes me as more of an annoyance than a reliability hazard (at least in terms of unwanted reboots or  crashes.)

The results raise the interesting question of whether there are similar results for servers. Given that servers from major vendors such as Dell and H-P come with very clean Windows installs, I wouldn’t expect to see driver issues play a major part in server reliability. My intuition is that the basic hardware designs from tier 1 vendors are all roughly equal in reliability, and that components such as SAN HBAs or RAID controllers probably have a bigger negative impact on overall reliability than the servers themselves– but I don’t have data to back that up. I’m sure that server vendors do, and equally sure that they guard it jealously.

More broadly, it’s fascinating that we can even have this discussion.

First of all, the rise of cloud-based services like Soluto (and Microsoft’s own Windows Intune) means that now we have data that can tell us fascinating things. I remember that during the development period of Windows 2003, Microsoft spent a great deal of effort persuading customers to send them crash dumps for analysis. The analysis revealed that the top two causes of server failures were badly behaving drivers and administrator errors. There’s not much we can do about problem #2, but Microsoft attacked the first problem in a number of ways, including restructuring how drivers are loaded and introducing driver signing as a means of weeding out unstable or buggy drivers. But that was a huge engineering effort led by a single vendor, using data that only they had– and Microsoft certainly didn’t embarrass or praise any particular OEM based on the number of crashes their hardware and drivers had.

Second, Microsoft’s ongoing effort to turn itself into a software + services + devices company (or whatever they’re calling it this week) means that they are able to gather a huge wealth of data about usage and behavior. We’ve seen them use that data to design the Office fluent interface, redesign the Xbox 360 dashboard multiple times, and push a consistent visual design language across Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Xbox 360, and apps for other platforms such as Xbox SmartGlass. It’s interesting to think about the kind of data they are gathering from operating Office 365, and what kind of patterns that might reveal. I can imagine that Microsoft would like to encourage Exchange 2013 customers to share data gathered by Managed Availability, but there are challenges in persuading customers to allow that data collection, so we’ll have to see what happens.

To the cloud…

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2013-04-22 · 22:13

Blacklist blacklist blacklist: the forbidden word

I just got chapter 6 of Exchange 2013 Inside Out: Clients, Connectivity, and Unified Messaging back from Microsoft Press. Like most other major publishers, Microsoft Press has a strict process to try to catch potentially offensive, libelous, slanderous, or sensitive terms before they appear in print. In this particular chapter, the editors requested many changes because of the odd vocabulary associated with message hygiene. For example, it’s OK to say “spam” to mean “an unwanted commercial e-mail message,” but it’s not OK to say “ham” to mean “a legitimate or desired commercial e-mail message” because in some book markets, ham is either unheard of or regarded as offensive.

However, they also busted me for using “blacklist,” as in “real-time blacklist.” This is the accepted term of art for a DNS-based system that allows an e-mail server to look up IP addresses of senders in real time to decide if they appear on a list of known or suspected spammers. Apparently “blacklist” is an offensive word in some contexts, although I’m having a hard time figuring out where or why.

Imagine my surprise when I fired up my Xbox tonight and saw this:

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Now, to be clear, I get it– Microsoft Press is not the same as IEB, Microsoft’s behemoth of a business unit. I’m sure they have different rules or something. And my editor, bless her heart, is only enforcing the rules forced on her by some clique of zampolits…but seriously?! Xbox LIVE has tens of millions of worldwide customers who are seeing this forbidden word. On the other hand,  my book, if I am very lucky, may sell as many as 25,000 copies (that would make it a runaway hit by computer book standards), and yet I can’t use a well-known and commonly accepted term in context.

Sheesh…

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2013-04-20 · 17:36

Exchange OWA IM integration and Lync trusted application pools

I am a bit ashamed to say that I wasted most of a day on this, but I’m posting this in the hopes that I can help someone else avoid the same mistake I made.

I just spent about five hours troubleshooting why I couldn’t get Exchange 2013 Outlook Web App to display IM and presence data from a Lync 2013 standard edition server. I had carefully followed the integration steps in the documentation, including the part that says this:

If you have installed the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging Call Router service and the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging service on the same computer then there is no need to create a trusted application pool for Outlook Web App. (This assumes that the server in question is hosting a SipName UM dial plan.

So, having read that, I didn’t set up a trusted application pool or trusted application… and IM didn’t work.

I fussed with certificates. I read a ton of documentation. I swore. I drank too much diet Coke. I ran OCSLogger and found errors about an unknown peer. “AHA!” I thought. “There must be an error in the docs and you really do need to create a trusted application pool.”

So I created the pool and the trusted app. Two quick lines of PowerShell, a quick login to OWA, and voila:

NewImage

As much as I would like to claim that it was a documentation error, this was pure fail on my part: the problem was that my Exchange 2013 server doesn’t host a SIP dial plan, so Lync doesn’t automatically add it to the Lync known servers table. It will have a SIP dial plan when I get to the next section of this chapter, but that’s a post for another day.

So, in summary: yes, you do need to create a trusted application pool and application for your Exchange servers even if they are multi-role unless they are hosting a SIP dial plan. 

Now, time for another diet Coke…

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