Restoring deleted items from Public Folders natively

This morning I had a user call up and say that half the meeting room calendars (which are public folders) were empty. I checked via Exchange Management Console and could confirm that there were no items. However under the statistics for the folder, I noticed that it was showing a total deleted items size.

I decided to check this out through ExFolders (Exchange 2010 replacement for PFDAVAdmin) and did come across a problem as I was getting the error "An error occurred while trying to establish a connection to the exchange server. Exception: the Active Directory user wasn't found". To get past this issue open ADSIEDIT and select Configuration from the Well Known Naming Context drop down menu. Then drill down to Configuration> Services> Microsoft Exchange> Domain Name> Administrative Groups> First Administrative Group> and then delete the Servers object. This can sometimes be left behind from old Exchange 2003 installs. As soon as that is gone then ExFolders can continue (please read the "read me" for ExFolders as it does specify to run the reg edit file and also to move ExFolders.exe to your Exchange location\bin\ folder, which is generally in <drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin. It will crash otherwise).

After finding one of the folders that had its content deleting I noticed that at the bottom, there is a "normal contents" and "deleted contents" radio buttons. Unsurprisingly, selecting "deleted contents" brings up the list of deleted items. To restore them it is a simple task of selecting the items, right clicking and selecting "restore items". Bingo the items are back and I didn't even need to get out of my chair to get to the backup tapes. Which is handy as it is in the opposite direction to the pub...

Cannot login to BES Express 5

I recently installed a new BES Express 5 server at a client site as their old BES 4.1 environment was becoming a bit unreliable. Thought everything installed perfectly and no error messages appeared, whenever I tried to login as either besadmin or the domain administrator, it said that "The username, password, or domain is not correct. Please correct the entry."



I was 100% sure all the details were correct and oddly after a few attempts just to make sure, the besadmin account became locked. This meant that it was passing the details through to AD at least so I knew it wasn't broken in that aspect. I had looked through a few forums and noted that some people suggested adding Kerberos authentication to the besadmin account and this will do the trick. I have installed a few BES environments and never had to do this, so I decided to skip that step. I did notice that both passwords contained a £ or #, which are unsupported characters. I changed the besadmin password to not contain the £ and changed the password for each of the services that used the besadmin account on the new BES server. I also entered in the new password into Blackberry Server Configuration> Administrator Service - AD Settings tab and then restarted the server.

Once this rebooted and all the services started up OK, I could happily login and begin to move users across using the Blackberry Transporter Tool.

For more information on unsupported characters in Blackberry service passwords and how to troubleshoot authentication issues please see Blackberry KB19200 and then go to the local for a nice ale and save yourself 1p ;)

M Audio Delta card not working in OpenSUSE 12.3

Now I keep flipping between various Linux distributions. Recently I decided that I will run OpenSUSE 12.3 on my desktop and Ubuntu on my laptop. Now I have an old M Audio Delta 66 sound card, which I have ALWAYS had issues with (not only in Linux but Windows too from Vista upwards) and this was no different with OpenSUSE 12.3. There was no audio at all and I could not change any settings at all in System Settings > Sound (If I tried to load this up, it would crash).I ran lspci and could see the item was listed:

mike@Mike-Suse-PC:~> /sbin/lspci | grep -i audio
02:07.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. ICE1712 [Envy24] PCI Multi-Channel I/O Controller (rev 02)
05:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV770 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4850/4870]

Now I could see the sound card listed (Its the ICE1712 device) so I knew it was running at least. I've never been able to get this to work with pulse audio running so I removed this and installed alsa tools. To install this run the following:

sudo zypper install alsa-tools

After this has been installed I was able to edit the various inputs I use through the card (I use the Omni Studio expanded unit also). Now it depends on how you have yours set up, though I use the monitor outputs for my M Audio BX-8a speakers (my setup in Yast is listed below and as you can see I just use the DAC outputs, which are the monitor outputs on the soundcard). I also removed Pulseaudio as I no longer required this

I also removed pulse audio since I was no longer using it, however you can leave it installed if you really want (to uninstall just run sudo zypper remove pulseaudio). Now for MP3 support you will need to install the codecs for these as free and open source software is not allowed to package these together. There's two ways to do this:

The Easy way

Simply click on this link and it will install all the relevant codecs you need for multimedia playback (MP3 and DVD etc)

The Terminal way

To install all the codecs you need you will first of all need to run the following commands in the terminal:

Add the needed repositories (skip the dvd repo if you don't need DVD playback)

zypper addrepo -f http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/packman/suse/12.3/ packman
zypper addrepo -f http://opensuse-guide.org/repo/12.3/ dvd

Now this will add in the repositories needed to install all the items you need and keep them up to date also. The next command you need to run will command OpenSUSE to install the various codecs you need:

zypper install libxine2-codecs k3b-codecs ffmpeg lame gstreamer-0_10-plugins-bad gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ugly-orig-addon gstreamer-0_10-plugins-ffmpeg libdvdcss2

Now once everything is installed and you have some glorious music playing out, I'd say it would be prime time to grab a fine ale and save yourself 1p ;)