I passed 70-620 today, which was my first MCTS exam. It’s just Vista configuration, pretty easy test, although I was amused by how consumer focused this stuff is now which crap like windows media and whatnot. They really are going for a three tier model like Cisco, although I’ll never bother with the MCA while I’d like to get a CCIE some day.

It was a lame test, I should have taken 70-624 which is about the new Business Desktop Deployment software which I’m hoping is RIS done right, although I haven’t used it yet. I guess that’s why, I’ve been using Vista a bit since I’m supporting it at work now. Either meets a pre-requisite for the upcoming MCITP: Enterprise Administrator, which looks like the next certification to replace my MCSE: Server 2003 cert. I guess I just took the easier route. I think the other Server 2008 exams are out, but I’m not using it yet. I don’t know if I’ll get more Vista certs for the MCDST equivalent next or go back to something harder like Cisco or LPI. Upgrading to an LPIC-3 or finishing my CCNP would probably be a better use of my time.

I have an AT&T (Cingular) (HTC) Tilt with Windows Mobile 6. There’s some extra charge for tethering, I don’t know anything about that. This is kind of like the GPS in it they want you to buy Telenav or something, but it works out of the box with google maps mobile if you download it. I used the QuickGPS in the control panel somewhere to make it gps-lock faster, but that’s another converation.

Anyways, I have a laptop with ActiveSync 4.5 installed running XP Pro SP2. When I connect the phone using USB, activesync wants to sync it, which is slightly annoying because it only supports profiles for two computers, so syncing to my home desktop, work desktop and laptop is a no-fly zone.

ipconfig will show a 169.254.x.x address with no dns and the gateway pointing back to the computer with the phone I believe as a dhcp server

Anyways, if you use File Explorer on the phone to navigate to \Windows, you’ll find ‘Internet Sharing’. I haven’t figured out how to make a menu option yet, I assume there normally is one but it’s removed as Cingular wants to get that extra fee out of you. If you run this, leave it on USB and Medianet and hit connect, you’ll see it disconnect on your laptop and Windows will redetect it as a as windows mobile based internet sharing device.

ipconfig will now show a 192.168.0.x address with gateway/dhcp/dns of the phone. I assume it’s NATing. Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN works fine through it at least, I haven’t tried anything IPSEC based though.

It looks like activesync doesn’t see the phone anymore, I figure we need to choose disconnect in Internet Sharing on the phone to make the usb cable go back to normal mode.

Lots of examples on the net for scripting password changes using sed and perl and all kinds of other crap, easier is to use chpasswd:

bash# for host in host1 host2 host3; do ssh $host ‘echo root:newpassword | chpasswd’ ; done

newpassword is in cleartext. looks like there’s an option on chpasswd to use DES or something instead, I just needed to set these all quickly and move along. you’ll have to deal with ssh authentication yourself like either typing in the password or keys or whatever.

Haven’t had to write batch scripts for a while, forgot the FOR syntax. Most annoying was remembering that the variable name can’t be more than a character, such as:

for /L %foo in (1,1,254) do echo %foo
%foo was unexpected at this time.

If you just change foo to x it works fine, i.e. for updating dns entries quickly:

for /L %x in (1,1,254) do dnscmd domaincontroller /recordadd yourdomain.com 192.168.10-%x.vpn A 192.168.10.%x
for /L %x in (1,1,254) do dnscmd domaincontroller /recordadd 10.168.192.in-addr.arpa. %x PTR 192-168-10-%x.vpn.yourdomain.com.

Note that the later creates leafs with records using @ (parent folder). This is visually annoying. I don’t know another way to do it. Seems to work find and for whatever reason other entries start to follow this tree like automatically registered DNS from clients. Not that YOU are using dns to track if an IP address is available or not anyways.

While trying to document a network I couldn’t get into a dell powerconnect 2724. Every time I tried to log in I got a “user name or password is missing” error. The switch was in production so I couldn’t try to reset it to defaults and I needed to see the vlan configuration in the first place. I ended up emailing another administrator who I thought had set it up and he replied with a username/password I had tried. A few minutes later he said he had to do it from a machine without Avast installed.

I tried it today and sure enough avast resident protection breaks things. The TCP streams are interesting to take a look at, looks like avast might be throwing a spurious return in the http request so the username and password are being sent in a separate segment. Disabling resident protection makes everything work normal again.

Armed with avast as a search term, it looks like a common problem. The 2748 works fine over http. It does use different post variables and doesn’t appear to bother to encode the passwords. I assume that was base64 encoding on the 2724.

I think this was easy to find, but I was really happy to find this kb article late last night. If you haven’t installed 2003 R2 before, it’s basically a 2003 install with a 2nd CD that installs the R2 parts. The cool part about this is you can upgrade a 2003 server to R2 with just the 2nd CD. The article has a bunch of edge cases but basically if you have 2003 SPx Standard, you can upgrade to R2 just by running the setup on the 2nd R2 CD. It’s worth noting that the install warned that I would not be able to uninstall the service pack after the upgrade.

I had a server that needed to be R2 as it was x64 and someone else had built it, installed updates, done the dcpromo, etc. I had to be R2 as SFU (Services For Unix) won’t install on x64. I tried. It said no. Fortunately R2 has parts of SFU built in, rebranded as Identity Management for Unix. Upgrading to/Installing R2 x64 was pretty easy, except that I got nervous when a .NET Framework child install took forever and provided no progress indication.

R2 provides RFC2307 compliantish schema updates that allow putting uid/gid/shell/etc into LDAP. There’s even an ADUC tab called “Unix Attributes”, but I didn’t see anything more enterprise. It just assigns the next available uid starting at 10,000 out of the box. It’s really part of this “NIS Server” functionality, so if you’re a NIS shop it may be easy to tie the bits together. DO NOT Install ‘Password Synchronization’. You don’t need it for NIS/LDAP, and it appears you have to demote to remove it.

There’s good info out there here and here on how to do this, I’m not going to repeat them.

A few notes though:

1) You do not need password syncronization installed when using Identity management for Unix (what Services for Unix is called in R2. Note that R2 x64 supports this stuff while SFU won’t install on on 2003 SP2 x64). You just need the NIS Server for Unix module and the admin tools, which is what you get if you just click Identity Management for Unix in add/remove programs under something like Active Directory something.

Interestingly I’ve been crashing another DC trying to get that working and while I’ve done this before it’d been a while and I forgot this key point: pam_ldap does NOT look for the users password in LDAP. It looks for the user in LDAP using the binddn to search, then BINDS as the user using the provided password to see if it succeeds or fails.

2) If when you log in as user ‘getent passwd’ stops providing useful information, and w, ls -l, etc can’t resolve the uid to a name, or “I have no name!” is part of your shell prompt, it’s because the pam stuff isn’t running as root and the user doesn’t have access to the right ldap bind credentials. I had rootbinddn set and passwords in /etc/*.secret which were 600. But AD doesn’t allow anonymous binds, so I had to move all this to the conf files and 644 them, setting binddn and bindpw instead of rootbinddn.

Story is that you could run nscd (name service caching daemon) as root and then hide this stuff from the user, I don’t have the time do deal with this at the moment though.

3) Changing passwords. I was getting this error at first:

Enter login(LDAP) password:
New password:
passwd: Authentication information cannot be recovered
passwd: password unchanged

Putting my “password sufficient pam_ldap.so” line before the pam_unix.so line in /etc/pam.d/common-password fixed that. Then:

LDAP password information update failed: Unknown error
00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150A45, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0

Watching the LDAP transaction I saw that we were binding as the user (not the binddn) and sending a crypt password. I read in the man page about pam_password ad which I set and then I started getting this instead:

LDAP password information update failed: Unknown error
00002077: SvcErr: DSID-03190DC9, problem 5003 (WILL_NOT_PERFORM), data 0

Because I hadn’t set up SSL yet. turning on ‘ssl start_tls’ didn’t work but setting “ssl on” and “tls_checkpeer no” which makes it not verify the certs worked alright.

I put the certs in and tried to turn on tls_checkpeer but had failures and saw a lot of traffic that looked like “SASL GSS-API Integrity: searchResDone(15886) insufficientAccessRights (00002105: LdapErr: DSID-0C0907C9, comment: Error processing control, data 0, vece) [0 results]”. At first I assumed this was because I wasn’t running krb5. Everyone seems to set up winbind and I’m trying not to. Anyways, password changes still fail with:

LDAP password information update failed: Unknown error
0000052D: AtrErr: DSID-03190F00, #1:
0: 0000052D: DSID-03190F00, problem 1005 (CONSTRAINT_ATT_TYPE), data 0, Att 9005a (unicodePwd)

I assumed at first this might be the “you’re not using a hard enough password” error, but it wasn’t the case.

I spent hours flipping different options trying to get tls to work without setting “tls_checkpeer no”. using tls (ldaps:// for the uri) or starttls with the “sasl_secprops maxssf=0” AD hack didn’t work. Eventually I stumbled over this and changed my ldaps:// URI from the IP address of the DC to the FQDN of the DC and now ssl works without tls_checkpeer no. !!!! Just put the hostname and IP in /etc/hosts if you care.

Unfortunately I can’t find a newer version of this kb article that describes how unicodepwd access control works in Windows 2000.

I grabbed the source with apt-get and it looks sane:

case PASSWORD_AD:
/*
* Patch from Norbert Klasen :
*
* To be able to change a password in AD via LDAP, an SSL connection
* with a cipher strength of at least 128 bit must be established.
* http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q264/4/80.ASP
* http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q247/0/78.ASP
*
* The password attribute used by AD is unicodePwd. Its syntax is octect
* string. The actual value is the password surrounded by quotes in
* Unicode (LSBFirst).
*
* NT passwords can have max. 14 characters.
*
* FIXME:
* The conversion to Unicode only works if the locale is
* ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1) [of which ASCII is a subset].
*/

snprintf (new_password_with_quotes, sizeof (new_password_with_quotes),
“\”%s\””, new_password);
memset (new_unicode_password, 0, sizeof (new_unicode_password));
for (i = 0; i < bv_val =" new_unicode_password;" bv_len =" strlen" modv_bvals =" bvalsnew;" mod_type =" (char">conf->rootbinddn || getuid () != 0)
{
/* user must supply old password */
snprintf (old_password_with_quotes,
sizeof (old_password_with_quotes), “\”%s\””,
old_password);
memset (old_unicode_password, 0, sizeof (old_unicode_password));
for (i = 0; i < bv_val =" old_unicode_password;" bv_len =" strlen" modv_bvals =" bvalsold;" mod_type =" (char" mod_op =" LDAP_MOD_DELETE" mod_op =" LDAP_MOD_ADD" mod_op =" LDAP_MOD_REPLACE">

Interestingly, I went and added rootbinddn and the /etc/pam_ldap.secret file and when changing the password for the ldap user as root it works. Oddly it seems to keep allowing all the past passwords for a while as well. I’m going to leave it as this, as all users will be root users for now and can sudo passwd username.

4) (update) I had problems using openssl 0.9.8c-4etch1 and libnss-ldap 251-7.5etch1 on debian etch where when I turned on ssl ‘getent passwd’ wouldn’t fully return. turning ssl off (and changing the uri back to ldap:// from ldaps://) would make things fine again. Wireshark looked like the stream was getting mucked up somewhere, as the windows server was sending back duplicate acks. A consultant said this is a libnss-ldap bug, or at least that padl’s libnss-ldap stuff is pretty buggy expecially when you get beyond a basic ldap configuration. it looks like we’re headed for a full blown winbind configuration instead of libnss.

I talked about this a bit in an earlier post but wanted to talk about it a bit more as it comes to multiple architectures. We run vmware vms on debian hosts with gobs of memory so generally they’re amd64/x64 but often the guests are i386/32bit debian installs to not have to deal with the ickyness of amd64 and compatibility like libraries.

apt-mirror supports multiple architectures but normally searching for information about it just pulls up tons of pages advertising as much. I finally found an example here off which I based my configs.

After installing apt-mirror (‘apt-get install apt-mirror’ on etch), a config file (/etc/apt/mirror.list) like:

## The default configuration options (uncomment and change to override)
##
#
# set base_path /var/spool/apt-mirror
# set mirror_path $base_path/mirror
# set skel_path $base_path/skel
# set var_path $base_path/var
#
# set defaultarch
# set nthreads 20
#
set _tilde 0

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main main/debian-installer
deb-amd64 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian etch main main/debian-installer
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main

deb http://security.us.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-amd64 http://security.us.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.us.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

The above was about 29GB before the deb-amd64 lines were added and apt-mirror is throwing in another 6.5GB right now for the deb-amd64 lines.

This howto says “In my tests I mirrored the main, contrib, and non-free sections of Debian Sarge and the main, restricted, and universe sections of Ubuntu Edgy Eft which took about 25GB of hard disk space and about 6 hours of download time on a 16MBit DSL line.” Note that does not included deb-src: “Also, I don’t want to mirror the source packages because in 95% of all installations you don’t need source packages, and they need a lot of space on the hard disk.”

Also they say “I will not mirror security updates in this tutorial – I think it’s a good idea to always download security updates directly from the internet. That way you can be sure you get the latest ones.” however I’ve seen when mirroring gutsy that important and large packages sometimes end up in the security updates. It’s really time consuming and annoying when a base package gets a security update and suddenly all your network installs slow down because you have to wait for it.

Running ‘su – apt-mirror -c apt-mirror’ will get you a tree in /var/spool/apt-mirror that looks like (ignoring the pool tree, where the debs are actually kept:

# tree -d -L 6 . -I pool
.
|– ftp.us.debian.org
| `– debian
| `– dists
| `– etch
| `– main
| |– binary-amd64
| |– binary-i386
| |– debian-installer
| `– source
`– security.us.debian.org
`– dists
`– etch
`– updates
|– contrib
| |– binary-amd64
| |– binary-i386
| `– source
`– main
|– binary-amd64
|– binary-i386
`– source

You’ll need to install apache and configure a tree to match a repository. Mines a little hacked with symlinks because I needed a link from stable to etch for the network install. In /var/www:

.
|– debian
| |– dists
| | |– etch -> /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/
| | `– stable -> etch
| `– pool -> /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/
|– preseed
`– security -> /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/security.us.debian.org

Pay particular note to the line wrapping depending on your screen width. For instance /var/www/debian/dists/etch is actually a symlink to /var/spool/apt-mirror/mirror/ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/etch while /var/www/debian/dists/stable is a symlink to /var/www/debian/dists/etch. Preseed is just a folder I keep my preseed config files in.

The lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list should look something like:

deb http://yourhost.local/debian/ etch main
deb-src deb http://yourhost.local/debian/ etch main
deb http://yourhost.local/security etch/updates main

it’s somewhat intelligent about knowing what architecture it is. it’ll need more tuning that that, you’ll find edge cases like security update source packages that you oughtta be able to fix pretty easy. I haven’t tuned it myself yet because it’s not a priority at this point.

Using debian instead of ubuntu at the new job and needed to rebuild my old network installs. Etch takes things a little differently than gutsy used to.

pxelinux.cfg/default:

LABEL etch_i386_install_auto
kernel debian/etch/i386/linux
append vga=normal initrd=debian/etch/i386/initrd.gz preseed/url=http://debian.yourdomain.local/preseed/standard.cfg debian-installer/locale=en_US console-keymaps-at/keymap=us
netcfg/get_hostname=unassigned netcfg/get_domain=yourdomain.local —

Otherwise I’m just pulling bits from my old configs. If you haven’t set this all up before, this is a good howto on pxe booting server installs using syslinux/pxelinux (my dhcp server is Windows, just remember to set DHCP options 66 to the pxe server IP and ‘pxelinux.0’ respectively). Note that I couldn’t get the netcfg lines to work in the preseed file, I assume because it’s technically coming before it grabs the preseed file.

Note that I’ve also used apt-mirror to create a local repository. Don’t forget you’ll need d-i (debian-installer) so you’ll need something like this for a mirror.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main main/debian-installer
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main

deb http://security.us.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.us.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib

You could probably do without the deb-src. I wasn’t really thinking at the time and included those lines. My last job all over our boxes had like 2.5TB of space on them so I stopped worrying about such things but at my new job all our storage is in SANs and I haven’t convinced anyone to let me abuse the non-crappy ones yet. Anyways, the above mirror came out to about 29GB.

You’ll need to set up a series of symlinks in apache to get it to serve this all up the way a real mirror would. I wish apt-mirror was smarter about this, especially at my last job where I had lots of local repositories and nests of links to get it all working and right now the SAN where this repo is stored doesn’t support symlinks so I’m still left with a nasty mess of them to get everything where I want it to be. I haven’t gotten around to getting the security mirror working but I’ll warn you that I think it needs to be a separate virtualhost under apache because the “d-i apt-setup/security_host string” preseed command takes a hostname, not a structure like a repository string does (hostname folder release). You can disable security updates on install and just use puppet, cfengine or whatever to take care of this later if you prefer anyways. Or do it like it’s done here, this works for me:

d-i apt-setup/security_host string
d-i apt-setup/local0/repository string http://yourhostserver/debian-security etch/updates main

When configuring passwords with something like:

d-i passwd/root-password-crypted password [md5’d password goes here]
d-i passwd/make-user boolean false

Note that you can create the md5 string with ‘openssl passwd -1’ or ‘grub-md5-crypt’ depending on whats on your box already, and yes keep the word ‘password’ after ‘root-password-crypted’

For the record my preseed ended up looking like this:

# based off of:
# http://loftninjas.org/blog/2007/10/ubuntu-lvm-network-install-part-2.html
# see also: http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/example-preseed.txt

# keymap/language/local/network done on kernel bootline since it’s before we fetch this preseed file

# prevents silly questions like asking about popularity-contest
d-i debconf/priority string critical

# set local tz, set hardware clock to utc
d-i time/zone string US/Pacific
d-i clock-setup/utc boolean true

# Install source
d-i mirror/country string enter information manually
d-i mirror/http/hostname string FIXME
d-i mirror/http/directory string /debian/
d-i mirror/codename string etch
d-i mirror/http/proxy string

d-i apt-setup/local0/repository string http://FIXME debian etch
d-i apt-setup/local0/comment string local debian etch repository
d-i apt-setup/local1/repository string http://FIXME security etch/updates main
d-i apt-setup/local1/comment string local debian etch security repository
d-i apt-setup/security_host string

# this should choose the most minimal install known so far
tasksel tasksel/first multiselect standard

# install additional apps
d-i pkgsel/include string tcpdump vim

d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean true

# specifc to etch, not the same with sarge
# install to the first scsi disk, automatically, single partition, with swap, no lvm
d-i partman-auto/init_automatically_partition select Guided – use entire disk
d-i partman-auto/disk string /dev/sda
d-i partman-auto/method string regular
d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe select All files in one partition (recommended for new users)
d-i partman/confirm_write_new_label boolean true
d-i partman/choose_partition select Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
d-i partman/confirm boolean true

# root password in md5, don’t ask to create a normal user
d-i passwd/root-password-crypted password FIXME
d-i passwd/make-user boolean false

# Avoid that last message about the install being complete.
d-i finish-install/reboot_in_progress note

Now just gotta figure out why Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 crashes because of lsass.exe whenever the new SFU/Services For Unix identity crap updates a changed password.

Many banks/sites are now asking security questions if you log in and don’t have a cookie from a previous login. Worst in my life are:

Key Bank. Requires you enter your credit card number and pin code to verify. How stupid it is to have people entering their pin codes anywhere?

Sallie Mae. Requires you complete five security questions and randomly asks you three. You can only choose from a preselected list. I considered setting all of my answers to ‘1’ or something, because I’ve had to call up and reset my account because I couldn’t remember if the answer to “what street do you live on” was:

26th
26th Ave
26th Ave E

Or what, if any punctuation was used.

This is almost enough bullshit to make me STOP using online banking and go back to the old way of doing things as this is getting to be LESS convenient.

Article in the news today about some Nick Carr dude and his new books prediction that IT will go away.

If Carr’s predictions come true, strong technical skills will still be valued by service providers.

It’s nice that was the last sentence in the article as that was what I was thinking the whole time. I believe there’s an argument hidden in there that service providers will require many less skilled folks that corporations. Software as a Service, heh, what’s the world coming to?

We’ll see I guess, but I have to wonder how much of the style of outsourcing back-lash we’ll see with this. I think outsourcing is just starting to settle and find it’s niches.

A user connecting from Vista 64 with the Cisco AnyConnect client was getting a “The VPN client was unable to successfully verify the IP forwarding table modifications. A VPN connection will not be established.” error when trying to connect. No changes had been made to the concentrator configuration which is an asa5520 running 8.0(3).

Via ASDM, there was a syslog notification of “SVC Message: 17/ERROR: Unable to successfully verify all routing table modifications are correct.”

Also annoyingly, the license only supports 2 clientless ssl vpn connections and the ssl vpn client appears to use a clientless connection initally which fails to shut down then the ssl client fails to connect, which prevents future logins with not error on the client side due to the licensing.

I found this article which linked the proble to Adobe Photoshop. The user had installed the photoshop trial recently and when he disabled bonjour for windows, which was installed by photoshop, the VPN worked fine.

I installed Bonjour on XP 32bit and could not reproduce the problem. Perhaps it’s a Vista 64 issue. It’s a small enough of an edge case that I don’t think I’ll try to reproduce.

User says: “it had a really odd name #1_Service_name###. it was added when I installed Adobe”

Doing the Christmas holiday fix peoples computers bit. This one had no sound on youtube, but sound worked fine elsewhere. Flash video was fine, just no sound both in IE and in Firefox. I finally found my answer here although there’s a lot of information here. The links were annoyingly hard to find.

In the registry the key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32\wavemapper was set to ‘msacm32.dvr’ not ‘msacm32.drv’. The youtube video that was playing in the background immediately started producing sound when I fixed the entry. Who knows what mucked it up. There are lots of stories about the Flash 9 upgrading causing troubles, I blame Norton and AOL, since they’re both on this computer and their bloatedness causes me nightmares about support problems.

On an ASA 5520 with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance Software Version 8.0(3), I had set up an SSL VPN. It was working okay as it was set up for dhcp to an existing subnet, which I assume was proxy-arping for its clients. Attempts to access other subnets using split tunneling was producing “No translation group found for ..” errors. I tried every possible combination of nat exceptions, which believe me was a lot. ASDM sometimes would throw errors when adding them and when I’d do this by hand sometimes I’d get an “Unable to download NAT policy for ACE” error. Frustrated, I removed almost everything I did and rebooted the damn thing.

This fixed the problem. Seriously, the Cisco needed a reboot. It wasn’t a config thing, as I saved just before the reboot. Perturbing. Now I’m using an address pool, and I’ve gotta go back and setup routes and our disappointly static routed network to the new pool.

Microsoft definitely takes the cake on useless error messages (There is no cake). While setting up an edge server, I started with this (OCS Protocol Stack, Error 14501, Office Communications Server event log):

A significant number of invalid certificates have been provided by remote IP address 24.18.22.8 when attempting to establish an MTLS peer. There have been 10 such failures in the last 1 minutes.
Certificate Names associated with this peer were

The serial number of this certificate is
.
The issuer of this certificate is
The specific failure types and their counts are identified below.
Instance count – Failure Type
10 C3E93D6D

First off, it’s totally awesome that you don’t get this error right away, you have to fail a bunch of times before it shows up in the event log. I hate certificates, so I’ve been assuming it was that. I ran C3E93D6D through ‘lcserror’ which comes with the resource kit.

lcserror C3E93D6D
0xC3E93D6D -> (SIPPROXY_E_CONNECTION_EXTERNAL_INTERNET_ACCESS_DISABLED) (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\ResKit\RTCERes.dll)

Remote user client cannot connect because access is disabled.

Yup. More useful. My client says “cannot sign in because the server is temporarily unavailable. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.” I thought about calling myself, but I’m an asshole and figured it wouldn’t do either of us any good. Another user on Vista x64 said he was getting a certificate error but I didn’t see it.

OMG! As an aside, if you’re doing this on x64, and you’re doing an edge server in a box not in the domain as I think the whole point is, you have to manage this through the Computer Management mmc snap-in. Long time windows fixers would be tempted to right click ‘My Computer’ and choose manage. Don’t. It doesn’t show up there. Run, or create a shortcut for ‘%windir%\system32\compmgmt.msc -32’. I don’t know how I found that out, deep in a document somewhere.

In here, I went to the ‘External User Access’ section of the status tab and saw “‘Remote User Access:’ was the big off red X. Right click, Properties on the server, Access Methods tab, Check ‘Allow remote user access to your network’. I guess. I mean, is this needed? Why else would I have an edge server? I guess for federation.

I feel like doing this caused a little more ssl traffic to pass, but it’s mostly binary data that means nothing to me. I still see the servers public ssl web cert being passed (via wireshark, remember to turn off chimney) though. A coworker said something about having to disable MTLS on the last version of LCS, but I couldn’t find it. It sort of made sense as the first error seems to be saying that the client is passing a bunk cert. Page 39 of the Edge Server Deployment Guide has a table for firewall configuration that lists:

Local Port: 5061 TCP (SIP/MTLS)
Local Port: 443 TCP (SIP/TLS)

I was thinking at first 443 was all the rage. But after looking in the above deployment guide at a diagram I started wiresharking for traffic on tcp pot 5061 as well and there’s a bunch of TLS crap going on there. Poking around on the ‘internal interface’ I see traffic is actually going to the ‘front end’ server. Running wireshark there, I see some similiar business and more fun errors, getting slightly more useful:

A significant number of invalid certificates have been provided by remote IP address ipaddressofedgeserver when attempting to establish an MTLS peer. There have been 10 such failures in the last 30 minutes.
Certificate Names associated with this peer were
actualinternalservername

The serial number of this certificate is
4e7f38cd00000000001e.
The issuer of this certificate is corp.widemile.com
The specific failure types and their counts are identified below.
Instance count – Failure Type
10 C3E93D6A

Run it through the damn tool again. Couldn’t this just be put in the event log?

lcserror C3E93D6A
0xC3E93D6A -> (SIPPROXY_E_ROUTING_UNKNOWN_SERVER) (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\ResKit\RTCERes.dll)
The FQDN in the peer’s certificate subject name is not a configured server.

I recently added the the edge server’s ip on the Host Authorization tab of the Front End Properties for the group (Under ‘Standard Edition Servers’ under the forst in the mmc snap in on the full server, not the edge server). Doing so added the name of the server under ‘access edge servers’ in ‘edge servers settings’ on the status tab for the forest in said mmc snap in. The dns didn’t match though. My dns is mess. The actual place where this comes from though is ‘Global Properties’ on the forest, ‘Edge Servers’ tab.

Followed my more failing, which you gotta keep repeating to get the darn error messages to show up the event log:

The server configuration validation mechanism detected some serious problems.

1 errors and 0 warnings were detected.

ERRORS:
Two server roles at FQDN [myedgeserversfqdn.test.org] have different ‘Throttle As Server’ options. First server has GUID {D00AC7FC-3E15-4CD6-A33A-0A823BE24EA1} and role ‘Authorized Host’ (option is not set). Second server has GUID {C8F1ADE5-9CB5-56AE-BDE3-D53B9D9B3BF9} and role ‘Edge Server’ (option is set).

WARNINGS:
No warnings

Cause: The configuration is invalid and the server might not behave as expected.
Resolution:
Review and correct the errors listed above, then restart the service. You also wish to review any warnings present.

So I go into the server group, right click, properties, front end properties, host authorization tab and set ‘throttle as server’.

This time I get a log in prompt on the click (Office Communicator 2007). Enter credentials, wait a while, and it works!

Older notes:

1) I had a bunch of problems getting past the certificate wizard because I thought importing certificates was enough, but this doesn’t actually assign them to the interfaces.

2) Speaking of interfaces, you need two. Well, two IPs. You can just add an IP Alias to the existing interface (TCP/IP Properties, advanced). Otherwise an early wizard fails with a useless error when it gets to the external interface page. See this forum thread for a little more info.