Author Archives: Daniel Anderson

How to Pass the 70-410 Exam

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G’day everyone, just sat and passed the 70-410 exam, the first of the 3 to gain my MCSA 2012. If you are studying for this exam then I would highly recommend the Exam Ref 70-410: Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012 by Craig Zacker. I thought the book covered all the exam objectives very well and that was the resource I relied on as well as the Train Signal videos.

If you have had hands on experience with the other Server OS’s then the knowledge you have already in DNS, AD, DHCP etc then all you really need to do is make sure you know how they are all installed and configured in Server 2012. Make sure you know Hyper-V inside out both from the GUI and by using PowerShell, I had quite a few questions on that area. The other area that my exam focused heavily on was Active Directory and Group management. Another thing make sure you know the basics of Local Storage, Raid-5, Stripped Disks, Spanned Disks and Mirrors.

Any onto the 70-411 exam, as there are no official MS Press Books available until later in the year I am going to use the 70-417 Book as apparently maps to to all the objectives, as Michael Bender suggests. In conjunction with that use the wiki resources created over at Born to Learn.

The 70-410 Exam

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My quest has started to complete the MCSA 2012. I have been studying the past few weeks for the 70-410 Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012 Exam. Got my resources together, The Official Microsoft Press Book, joined Born to Learn 90 days to MCSA challenge, signed up to Train Signal. Now for the exam this week, from all reports it is well done. I will post a follow up on the exam after I take it this week. Fingers crossed.

Prevent DNS Registration of Secondary or Additional IP Addresses

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There are times when you may need to prevent the DNS registration of a secondary or additional ip address on the same network adapter. I recently needed to do this when configuring SSL for Sharepoint 2013 and associated My Site Host.

After some research this is the command that did the trick.

Netsh int ipv4 add address Interface Name ip address skipassource=true

Where Interface Name is the name of the Network Connection and IP Address is the address you wish to assign.

Sharepoint 2013 User Profile Synchronization Service Will Not Start

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I came across another little issue when installing a new Sharepoint 2013 Server Farm and that is that the User Profile Synchronization Service Would Not Start.

After some research it turns out the account that the service uses needs to be in the Local Administrators group of the server that you are running it on. So after adding the account, in my case sp_farm, to that group and trying to start it again it still DID NOT WORK.

They Key and Resolution: After adding the account to the Local Admins group of the server, Restart the Sharepoint Timer Service.

Then try and start the User Profile Synchronization Service again and all should be hunky dory!.

Sharepoint 2013 – Sorry we could’t follow the document or site

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G’day everyone, I have been deploying a brand new install of Sharepoint 2013 over the past few days and ran into a problem with following documents and sites that I thought you might be interested in.

Problem: When clicking the Follow button in the top right hand corner of the page you receive this error with an awesome description:

Error

Pretty clear huh!…..

Well after going through the Sharepoint 2013 logs located here: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\LOGS I noticed this error in the log file : “Cannot open database “WSS_Content_576554434566776ef777ce6″ requested by login. The login failed. Log in for user ‘domain\username’.

Onto the SQL Server I go and open up Security > Logins and find the user. Right Click > Properties and select User Mapping. Find the database in the list that matches the one from the error log file, give it a tick, then in the database role membership window below put a tick next to SPDataAccess.

sql

Close your SQL Management Studio, go back to your Sharepoint site and find a document or site to follow and click the follow link up top and bingo, you can now follow sites and documents.

Happy Sharepointing.

How To Overcome The Exchange 2007 OAB Issues

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I have been working through an issue we have at the moment with the Exchange 2007 Offline Address Book (OAB) and it’s generation, replication and distribution. In my Exchange 2007 setup the server that houses the Mailstore Role is the server that generates the OAB and then should replicate to the Server that hosts the Client Access Server Role.

The first issue I was having was that the Generating Server was not generating the OAB correctly. Probably not a good thing if people need to the Global Address List. So I hunted through the Event Viewer and found errors pertaining to the System Attendant “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of the Universal Security Group”. Now what I did here was to RESTART the System Attendant Service and that fixed those errors. From my research I gathered that the System Attendant caches some information regarding Globsal Catalogue Server and other information. We had been moving the FSMO and GC Roles around so that would have been the issue there.
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Use SyncToy as a Backup Option

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I was scrolling through my RSS Feeds this morning and saw a great article from the Technet Magazine. It is a “Utility Spotlight” article on SyncToy. Working in an education environment where students and staff for that matter are always coming to out office to get their computers re imaged or fixed for some other reason and when you ask them have they got a backup of their documents the standard response is “NO, Can’t you do that for me?”.

After having a play around with SyncToy I have found that this could be a cool little utility for alot of my users. It is a simple, easy to setup and install peice of software that will work on either XP or Vista. It works by having “Folder Pairs”, a Left Folder and a Right Folder. You can setup different Folder Pairs as well. For example I might want to create a folder pair for just my Photo’s and copy them to a specific network location, then I might have another folder pair for my documents and so on.
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