Pinning Outlook 2013 icon to Windows 7 taskbar shows a 2nd icon when opened

There appears to be a bug with Outlook 2013 that will cause Windows 7 to show a 2nd icon if you pin it to the taskbar "too soon".  From testing if you pin the icon to the taskbar before first running it or even during the first run it will start showing 2 icons in the taskbar. I have managed to resolve this by unpinning all the Outlook icons on my taskbar, closing out Outlook, opening and reclosing Outlook (just to be sure) then pinning Outlook again from the start menu. Now when I open Outlook I am only getting the 1 icon in the taskbar and multiple Outlook 2013 windows stack correctly.

Update: The above was back during beta. If you have problems today I suggest unpinning your icons then run Outlook and right click and pin from the running icon instead of from the start menu.

Connecting via VPN to authenticate to a domain in Windows 7

In XP there used to be an option to connect via dial-up to log in to a computer. This is no longer obviously available in Window 7. The good news is it still exists and works really well. This is how to configure it.

1. Login as a user with local admin rights 
2. Create the VPN connection by going to “Network and Sharing Center”, then click “Setup up a connection or network” - “Connect to a workplace”.
3. Fill out the details to connect to your work VPN and choose the option to allow other people to use this connection. This is what will make the option appear on the log in screen. 
4. Complete the wizard and save the connection.

You can now use this connection to log in directly to the domain and/or to join the PC to the domain if needed.

1. After rebooting, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to log on if prompted. 
2. Click Switch User to view other logon options. 
3. Will now see a blue button in the lower left for each connection shared with all users. 
4. Click the blue button.
5. Type the username and password for the connection and click the blue arrow to connect. 
6. After the connection is established, Windows will use the same credentials to try to log into Windows. If that fails, (for example you use a different password for your VPN) the connection remains active and you will be taken back to the Windows log in screen to submit Windows credentials.

HP RAID 50 NPG raid info

Lately when buying HP servers I have started seeing what looks like a new type of RAID listed when choosing RAID 50. Depending on the number of disks you have you may see the following options available as part of RAID 50.

RAID 50 NPG:2
RAID 50 NPG:3
RAID 50 NPG:4

When I asked around what these were no one seemed to know so I started creating them on a D2700 and seeing what the result was. Below is a listing of what you end up with when you create each of these. It appears all the NPG means is Number of Parity Groups. I’ve seen a lot of confusion about this both inside and outside of HP support. One advantage to this is the ability to lose more than 1 disk as long as they are different parity groups. A disadvantage is to increase storage you would need to add the number of disks you have of parity groups.

RAID 50 NPG:2

Drives Assigned to Parity Group 1	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 1 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 2 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 3 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 4 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 5 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 6
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 2	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 7 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 8 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 9 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 10 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 11 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 12

RAID 50 NPG:3

Drives Assigned to Parity Group 1	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 1 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 2 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 3 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 4
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 2	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 5 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 6 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 7 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 8
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 3	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 9 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 10 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 11 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 12

RAID 50 NPG:4

Drives Assigned to Parity Group 1	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 1 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 2 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 3
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 2	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 4 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 5 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 6
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 3	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 7 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 8 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 9
Drives Assigned to Parity Group 4	146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 10 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 11 146 GB 2-Port SAS Drive at Port 2E : Box 1 : Bay 12

Connect PowerShell to Office 365 cloud

We do quite a few Office 365 migrations and recently found out you can connect PowerShell to the Office 365 cloud and do quite a lot of tasks that way instead of using their web interface. This is going to make our jobs much easier. I will show you how to connect to 365 and some examples of things you can do. Some of the more powerful scripts such as user control require you to install the Office 365 sign in tool and the Microsoft Online PowerShell snap-in.

To be able to run commands that affect user accounts you must install the Microsoft Online Services Module for PowerShell which can be found here which also requires the single sign on tool located here.

To connect to Office 365 with PowerShell run the following 4 commands. You will be prompted for your account credentials.

set-executionpolicy remotesigned
$LiveCred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

To connect to the user management service issue the following

connect-msolservice

To set a users password to something you know and set them to not have to change it

Set-MsolUserPassword -UserPrincipalName CHANGETO@USERNAME -NewPassword SETTHISTOTHENEWPW -ForceChangePassword $false

To set all users to not have to change password every 90 days

Get-MsolUser | Set-MsolUser –PasswordNeverExpires $True

SBS Server 2003 Exchange ActiveSync forbidden

Recently I worked on a customer who had Exchange 2003 and a new iPhone he wanted to connect but was failing. The phone actually verified and connected but they kept get a message of cannot get mail.  Their first issue was an invalid SSL certificate but once we cleared that up the iPhone was still kicking back an error it could not get email and an android device we tested with gave a access denied error. The tool at https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com gave the following error

An HTTP 403 forbidden response was received. The response appears to have come from Unknown. Body of the response: <body><h2>HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden</h2></body>

I saw several suggestions for this on the web but their problem ended up being that their previous IT had configured a website on port 80 and redirected the default website to port 8082. Once we switched this back everything started working and the support tool passed all tests.

If you have additional issues this post is a good resource.

VBscript FileSystemObject copy file gives permission denied error

This is something I forget about since I don't do a lot of file copying using VBS but I figured it is good information to have out there.

Any time you are copying to a folder using VBScript your folder path needs to have the trailing \ on it or your script will try to treat your folder like a file and try to overwrite it and give a permission denied.

So while this example will not work:

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile("c:\test.txt")
objFile.Copy "c:\temp", True

This one will:

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.GetFile("c:\test.txt")
objFile.Copy "c:\temp\", True

Windows 7 gadgets show a white box with greater than sign

Recently had a Windows 7 user who had some desktop gadgets from MSDN that were showing up as a small white box with a greater than sign in it while other gadgets were showing up fine. The fix was surprisingly simple.

Go into the control panel, choose default programs, set program access and computer defaults, select the Microsoft Windows option and click ok. Close down the sidebar process and restart it.  Gadgets should show up normal again.

You can reset your default programs back after this.