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A New Client

A client turned up our first full-time Mail.app Mac user with Snow Leopard today. I was called in because of attachment sending problems. It seems that files around 7MB would attach and send, but anything larger was failing. The entrenched support reported watching logs, etc. IIS was returning a 401 then a 500 for the sessions that failed, and there was no clear reason.

Troubleshooting

After a little inspection, I thought it might be the request size / http post size. After a quick verification, i determined that the registry limit was not interfering. I next examined the web.config, located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ClientAccess\exchweb\EWS on the server in question. Sure enough, at the bottom:

    </customErrors>
    < httpRuntime maxRequestLength="819200" />
  </system.web>
</configuration>

I increased the limit, and restarted IIS for good measure. The attachments which the server balked at now sent easily and quickly. Yay!.

Errata

During these fateful events, while working and trying to send a 150MB iso to another mail box, Mail.app went nuts and began eating RAM. In less then one minute, it had consumed 1.2GB and swap began on my poor Mac. Quick fingers and a killall Mail in a ubiquitous terminal window solved the problem.

For certainty, I wiped my Mail directory from my Library (I don't use Mail.app for this reason). Problem Solved.

Question

Why is this setting so obscure in Exchange?

It's Daylight Savings Time - Again. Time for a new round of FAIL from Microsoft.

Windows Mobile

A clients' Verizon Windows Mobile phone has changed all the appointments for the foreseeable future to an hour later than originally scheduled.

Entourage

Microsoft Entourage 2004, on my older PowerBook G4 is rendering dates, and /hour/ in the future. I caught it when an email I sent was CC'd to my Gmail account, and the account said, "11:16 AM (-57 minutes ago)". Special.

Windows Mobile

Another clients' BRAND NEW Windows Mobile Phone, running Palm, on DST-Day, experienced EPIC FAILURE and had to have the firmware reloaded. (???) If it wasn't THE day when they turned it on, I would not blame DST.... but.... Also, after speaking with them, I am really unclear on whom to blame. I haven't followed the latest Palm stuff, but is this actually Windows problem?

Windows Mobile: ceTwit

vkoser writes about a problem with date math in ceTwit - and, I am just going to blame Microsoft because of their consistent steaming piles on this one.

Zune

So far, I have heard of no new Zune problems, but the leap-second bug deserves a second mention. Well played Redmond. Nice quality control.

Wrap up

Well, that's about it for todays "Microsoft Sucks" rant. It's been a decade already, and they still have bi-annual issues with dates. Remember DST 2007? That was a FUBAR mess. Turned out that Exchange with OWA didn't put proper TZ info on some calendar entires, and and Mac/Entourage users were totally boned. You had to have an Outlook client, on Windows, to properly affect the fix. I know some admins who had to restore after the run. The tests went well, but the production run screwed everyone.

Last DST change I had three clients with messed up appointments. Not all appointments, about 5% of them. A secretary had to audit all of them. We finally back dated a PC, and it did work. We printed out and compared in order to locate the problems. EXCHANGE AND OUTLOOK SUCK!

There are a number of articles on removing Symantec AntiVirus silently. There is a link to thread on avoiding MSI uninstall reboots. There are good suggestions and some bad. Mostly it's simple. Cleaning up SAV w/o a prompt, password, or user-required action is a little non-trivial.

Someone else did the heavy lifting. You must instruct Symantec to ignore the uninstall password, and that is easily accomplished via a reg-hack. However, reghack via GPO is a PITA. Google turned up: Policy Maker (Registry Extension). This is not news. NEWS is that it farking crashes as soon as you try to use it. Well, it crashed if you have IE7 installed.

Ironically, perhaps, you must update the registry to make this work. Specifically you must disable object caching in IE7 for mmc.exe. (This is too precious). Microsoft Article (which OUGHT to be LINKED from the Webpage of the tool, or included in the installer, given how long IE7 has been out) #938611 - GP Snapin Crash fix.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_OBJECT_CACHING]
@=""
"mmc.exe"=dword:00000000