ECS Computer Solutions, Christchurch

I have been pulling my hair out trying to resolve a backup issue with a client’s backup on Veritas BackupExec 9.1. What happened was that backup was failing on 1 message because the antivirus couldn’t scan it, and locked the backup from reading it.

BackupExecs error was:
0xa0008488 - Access is denied
Backup - \\SERVER\Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes
Access denied to file FirstName LastName [user]FW: Your Tracking # 835503826372.

Now this particular message was found in the Inbox, I then deleted it and emptied the Deleted Items.
Backup still failed! But this time the message was it the root_store IE. The top level of the Mailbox and I couldn’t see it with OWA Client etc. I had to pass it on to another engineer who started looking at it, who then gave me the right tact to search.

I deleted the message by using a Microsoft tool called MDB Viewer, this is a low level tool for Mailboxes,  It’s on the exchange CD-ROM CD-ROM_Drive\Server\Support\Utils\I386\Mdbvu32.exe

I then basically (Remember I don’t do Step by Steps, I do summarys) Choose the Server, Choose the Mailbox (username), then clicked  OpenMessageStore on the MDB menu,
Click Open Root Folder on the MDB menu
From there I saw the message in Messages in Folder Column, I selected it, Choose the operation IpFld->DeleteMessage() and called the function!

Woo Hoo Backup now works!

Merry Christmas to me and you!

So I was back the stupid clients that had the crappy mdaemon / IMAP setup. This time upgrading there MS Office version to 2003 in an effort to stop the IMAP pst file hitting the 2GB limit. Anyway after pulling my hair out to get it to use the 2003 UNICODE PST type store I came across this post: link

“This issue occurs if the DWORD value for the NewPSTFormat registry entry is set to 2. This condition requires Outlook to use the Unicode-based personal folders (.pst) file format. This file format is incompatible with IMAP. ” Fuck! Looks like stupid internet standards win again!

You know the worst part - The client is a lawyer and he explicitly asked me in a email if this will fix the problem, to which I replied “Yes it will”

Now I just need to find that damn message…….

Part of works server migration has meant that we are working on a new Terminal Server. I liked the old one better because:

• It had a run command
• I could view the system drives
• I could type H: in the address bar and it worked!
• It had command prompt access!
• No firefox installed (Hardened IE installed! OMG WTF!)

And the list goes on….. What I find mose stupid is a work for an IT company and they lock the shit down which make us less productive!!

(more…)

Had a client whose print queue would jam up and they couldn’t restart the printer spooler until you manually cleared the spooled documents. So I stole this piece of code and put it in a batch file. Works wonders!

@echo off
net stop "print spooler"
del /q "%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*"
net start "print spooler"

Update: The reason the spooler was dying was because when he printed a PDF document he would close Acrobat before the document finished and in turned killed the Print Spooler. Because we charge by the hour, he didn’t want it to be investigated any further, which is fine by me!

With my OpenSuSe and SLES Linux installations I was trying to remember how to add the rc prefix to MailScanner so I didn’t have to type /etc/init.d/MailScanner restart. All you need to do it add a symlink in /usr/sbin called rcmailscanner pointing to /etc/init.d/MailScanner. I cant believe Im forgot such a simple thing! DoH!