Overview

This behavior was experienced by a user trying to update the Business Phone attribute in the GAL to display internal phone extensions of employees. The Active Directory Telephone number attribute for each user object was updated, but the GAL was not displaying the updated Business Phone extensions. At first this was believed to be a synchronization issue with cached mode because when cached mode was disabled the GAL would display the updated phone extensions, but a gaining a better understanding of the Offline Address Book will shed some light on this behavior.

Exchange Cached Mode

When you enable Exchange Cached Mode in Outlook a copy of your mailbox and the Offline Address Book (OAB) is copied to your local computer. This mode was created to counter slow network latency issues that would slow down Outlook because it was constantly connecting to the Exchange server. With cached mode enabled Outlook will use both the offline and online copies of your mailbox to deliver a better user experience with Outlook slowing to a crawl when doing simple tasks like switch to a different folder.

How the Offline Address Book Works in Exchange

Exchange generates the OAB files every24 hours, or once per day, at 5:00 am by default. You can force Exchange to update the OAB more frequently but it is not recommended. The Outlook client will check for updates to the OAB once every 24 hours, but each Outlook client might check for updates at a different time and therefore can have different a different version of the OAB. For example, the server will update the OAB at 5:00 am, but one Outlook client might check for updates at 10:00 am, but another client might not check until 5:00 pm. During that 7 hours the 2 clients would have different versions of the OAB.

When the Outlook client checks for updates to the OAB it will first attempt to download the differential files and not the full OAB in order to prevent network congestion, but if the differential files are greater than 1/8 of the size of the full OAB then Outlook will download the entire copy of the OAB. That might happen in the event that there have been a lot of updates to the directory in the past 24-48 hours, such as when an area code is changed and every user is affected.  Outlook can be forced to download the updated OAB by clicking on Tools>then Send/Receive> then click Download Address Book. You’ll have to close Outlook and re-open and it will start before the download will start. Keep in mind that this will only download the changes that occurred prior to 5:00 am when Exchange generated the updated Offline Address Book. If changes were made after Exchange generated the OAB, then you would have to force Exchange to update the OAB and then force Outlook to download the address book, but this practice is not recommended by Microsoft.

Troubleshooting OAB problems

If you are troubleshooting an issue and want to confirm whether you are looking at the Offline Address Book or if you are pulling the online address book there is a simple way to check. Open the Address Book and right-click on Global Address List, then click Properties. It will display The current server is: and then path. If the path is pointing to a local drive then you are obviously using the offline address files. If the path points to a domain controller then you are using the online copy of the address book. You can see examples of each below:

Local OAB

Online Global Address List

Summary

That about covers the basics of the Offline Address Book and how it is downloaded to Outlook from the Exchange Server. Hopefully this has helped you if you were unclear at all on how the OAB works in Exchange. If you have questions please leave them below and I will answer them or if you have a comment I also appreciate hearing those as well. Thanks for stopping by.

The hot key for a IOGEAR GCS634U KVM is scroll lock + scroll lock + port number + Enter. Or to put it another way, double scroll lock, then the number (1-4) of the KVM port you want to switch to, then press Enter.

I was using a for the first time in a while and could not remember the correct hot key combination to switch the video input. I was in a bit of a hurry and had to do a little digging before I found the answer. So after that I wanted to put this up in case I can save someone some time when searching for the key combination. Also, I'm pretty sure this hot key also works on the GCS632U as well as many other KVMs.

Thanks for stopping by and if you liked this post please leave us a comment.

Users are reporting that after logging into the web interface they receive the following error when trying to launch an application, "An error occurred while making the requested connection." After logging in to the Xenapp Licensing server you notice that the Citrix licensing service is stopped. When you try to start the service you receive the following error, “Could not start the Citrix Licensing Service on Local Computer. Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly." The event log is that  lmadmin.exe is failing under Event ID 1000.

Citrix Licensing Service Will Not Start

At first, when I started troubleshooting this issue I was searching for the message, "An error occurred while making the requested connection." I came across this article that says to modify the WebInterface.conf file in order to resolve the issue. After making this change the error continued to show up and users could not launch any applications from the web interface. Looking at the services I noticed that the Citrix Licensing service was stopped. I tried many times to get the Licensing service to start, adjusted the recovery options to restart the service, but nothing would work. I also rebooted the licensing server which has cleared up similar issues in the past but the Licensing service was still failing. After doing some research everyone was pointing to this article on the Citrix Knowledge Center. I tried to follow the steps by moving the .lic files out of the licensing folder, but this article was written for an older version and some of the services mentioned did not exist. After over an hour of troubleshooting I decided to un-install and re-install the Citrix Licensing Management Console. Once this was complete I checked the licensing service and it was not started. I tried to access an application from the web interface but was still getting the error. I had log in to MyCitrix account and download the license file again and import to the License server. Went back to the web interface and successfully launched an application.

Resolution

This ultimately ended up being an issue with the Citirx License Server. The steps I took to resolve are as follows:

1. Re-install the Citrix Licensing Management Console.
2. Download your license file from your MyCitrix account.
3. Import the license file through the Licensing Management Console

When attempting to install Autocad Lt 2009 Updates you receive error 1625. This occurs when installing any updates including Update 1, Update 2.01, and Update 3. This issue has also been reported on other versions of Autocad including 2010.

Solution: Login  as the User who Installed Autocad

This problem can be resolved by logging in as the original user who installed Autocad  and running the updates. Installing the updates using the credentials of a user with local administrator privileges will still result in the error. After logging with the credentials of the user who installed Autocad the updates should complete successfully.

The updates to Autocad are supposed to help with unexpected crashing of the program and overall stability. After installing the updates we noticed that Autocad became much more stable with less unexpected freezes.

After Installing a Windows 7 VM on VMware Server 2.0, you do not have network access and no network adapter is present.

Install Windows 7 On VMware Server 2.0

I installed a Windows 7 VM, but because VMware does not officially support Windows 7 yet, it does not show up as on option under the guest Windows OS choices. I was not sure which option to choose so I proceeded with the install using Other as the OS. After choosing the hardware configuration the install started and seemed to finish just fine without any errors. The VM came up and everything looked good until I tried to get on the network. I was not getting and IP address and there was no network adapter present. I had other VMs working just fine so I knew there was no problem with the network configuration. After a little bit of research I found out that VMware Tools was not installed because I did not select one of the pre-configured choices for guest OS. I tried to do a manual install of VMware Tools and it failed.

Install VMware Tools – Workaround

I removed the previous VM and decided to do a clean install, but with one change to the configuration. I selected Windows Server 2008 as the Guest OS. The reason is that when you select  one of the existing guest OS choices VMware Tools is installed by default. The rest of the install was the same as before and completed successfully. When the VM powered on this time it had a network adapter present and I could access the network just fine. The only difference in this install was choosing Server 2008 at the beginning in order to install the VMware Tools automatically. Hopefully VMware will soon add native support for Windows 7.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td><img src="http://www.confighelper.com/images/0/" /><td></tr><tr><td><td></tr></table>,

The tool is now installed and can be accessed from Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. When you view the properties of a user there will now be a new tab called Additional Account Info.

When you click on the tab, you will see a ton of information that was not previously available, at least not easily available. The fields you will see are Password Last Set, Password Expires, whether the account is currently locked out or not, Last-Logon-Timestamp, SID, GUID. You will also see the Last Logon and Last Logoff time, the Last Bad Logon time, the number of times that user has logged onto the domain under Logon Count, and then the current Bad Password Count. Keep in mind that the Bad Password Count will reset according to the password policy in effect on the domain. Also, if you click the Domain PW Info… button you will see the Domain Password Policy.

There is a great deal of information available with this utility and it is great for tracking down annoying lockout issues. Using the Last Bad Logon information, you can think about what scheduled tasks might be running at that time that is using a certain account with an old expired password, possibly a service account running a scheduled job. Hopefully you found this information useful and please take time to review our other articles. Additionally, if this article has helped you then please feel free to link back to it or to the ConfigHelper site.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"><tr><td><img src="http://www.confighelper.com/images/0/" /><td></tr><tr><td><td></tr></table>

You have just installed VMware Server 2.0 for the first time and are trying to login and do not have the Login Name and Password.

Solution

VMware Server 2.0 is entirely web-based and no longer uses the familiar VMware 1.0 desktop application to manage the server. VMware Server 2.0 uses an existing account from your local OS install (i.e. Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, Linux, etc.) or your domain account. Note: If you are using a domain account you must enter the domain name before the username or the login will fail (i.e. domain\username).

XenApp Platinum 6.0, Windows Server 2008 R2

PROBLEM

After installing XenApp you run Discovery and receive the following error message: “Errors occurred when using Servername in the discovery process.”

Double-clicking the error message to see the error details reveals the following:

“An unexpected error occurred. Check that the server name is correct, that the server is on, that Citrix Presentation Server is installed on this server, and that the Citrix MFCOM Service is running.”

RESOLUTION

I followed the instructions on the Citrix forum to Enable Network COM+ access, and tried to run the discovery process but again received the same error message.

I realized that XenApp had been installed on the system with a local admin account, but the server was recently joined to a domain. I then un-installed XenApp, rebooted the server, then re-installed XenApp using an admin account that was part of the domain. (Citrix recommends that if you un-install XenApp, that you do not install it again until you have a freshly imaged server. This was in a test environment so I ignored these instructions, but did not have any problem after re-installing). After installing XenApp with the domain administrator account I ran discovery again the process completed successfully.

Note: As I later learned, XenApp 6.0 differs from 5.0 in that you do not need to pre-install the Windows roles, the installation will take care of that for you. If you are installing XenApp 6.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2 for the first time, you should be able to run the Citrix installation with out pre-installing the roles as you would with 5.0

You are trying to allocate licenses for a Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server) Platinum 6.0 server, but are receiving the following error : Error on “License Server Name” field: Invalid HOST ID xxxx.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this issue you need to use the filter button so that only XenApp is displayed. The reason for this is because XenApp uses the hostname to allocate licenses, but the citrix WANScaler Client uses a hardware MAC address to allocate licenses, resulting in the error mentioned above.

Follow the steps below in order to work around this issue.

1. Log on to My Citrix.

2. Highlight Choose a toolbox and select Activation System/Manage Licenses from the list.

3. From the current tool dropdown list, select View Licenses.

4. Next to the unallocated license you wish to allocate, click on the link Click to allocate.

5. Follow the prompts to allocate the license.

6. When prompted to Select Licenses to Allocate, highlight one product, such as "XenApp Platinum" and click on Filter products. Only XenApp Platinum should be appearing now.

7. Enter the quantity to allocate, enter the Hostname of the license server and, at the bottom of the page, select Allocate.

8. Download the license file.

9. Repeat steps 1 through 8 for the remaining products.

Note: In case you own WANScaler hardware appliances, you must allocate the WANScaler Client licenses to the Host ID of your hardware appliance (you can find the Host ID on your WANScaler under system tools). In case, you do not own WANScaler hardware appliances yet, there is no need to allocate the WANScaler Client licenses.

One technology sector that is still in it's infancy stages and growing at a rapid rate is the field of GPS tracking. Initially, designed for military applications, GPS tracking devices are now used by consumers, businesses and law enforcement for a variety of
purposes.

Some people may be asking themselves, "Why would I need a GPS tracking system for my business or family?" The answer is simple, accountability, security, and improved efficiency.

In the business world, a GPS tracking system can improve routing, employee accountability, communication efforts, mileage documentation and more. A business can improve customer service, ensure employees are not doing side work, and  keep in contact with mobile assets in the field with GPS tracking technology. GPS monitoring equipment provides a 21st century and technologically advanced solution to asset management.

From the everyday consumer or family perspective, a GPS tracking system can be used to monitor teen driving, elderly driving, as theft recovery devices and more. Verifying a teen driver is adhering to the rules of the road, or that a elderly family member with a fading memory is safe is something a person cannot place a price tag on.

Whether the need is for real-time or passive tracking technology, their is no denying that a GPS tracking system could result in a more efficient business model and improved family security.