Licensing for Terminal Server 2012

I had an issue where i believe i'd setup the licensing correctly for 2012 R2, seems there are a few things i need to do behind the scenes if i want a simple Session host that allows my client to connect to the terminal server via RDP.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2013/09/20/rd-licensing-configuration-on-windows-server-2012.aspx

This article above shows how to achieve this, but there is some small fine print that allows you to connect to a licensing server when none of those above steps seems to get a connection.

To guarantee that your TS will connect to a licensing server at all:

Run POWER-SHELL as Administrator

Run the following commands:

To configure the license server on RDSH/RDVH:

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting

$obj.SetSpecifiedLicenseServerList("License.contoso.com")

Note “License” is the name of the License Server in the environment

To verify the license server configuration on RDSH/RDVH:

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting

$obj.GetSpecifiedLicenseServerList()

To change the licensing mode on RDSH/RDVH:

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting

$obj.ChangeMode(value) - Value can be 2 - per Device, 4 - Per user

To validate the licensing mode:

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting

$obj. LicensingType

$obj.LicensingName

Once you have run these commands refresh the licensing page and you will see no more yellow warnings.

The issue seems to be related to not having a connection broker installed, if you don't have this installed then you will need to run these commands.

I personally do not need a connection broker but if you have more than 1 terminal server and need to contingency then it maybe required.

-Freeze

Recovering Email from Exchange 2010 using Shadow Protect

I had an opportunity to do a recovery on a few mailboxes from a site running Exchange 2010 and Shadow Protect.

So the procedure i used was simply to copy the database and log files from the shadow protect mounted backup to a folder on a drive that has enough space to restore the database to.  Lucky for me the database was small, only 8GB.

I copied the database logs to a folder called "Recovery" and under that folder i had speparate folders for both the logs and database.  One thing to remember is if the log files

So my folder stricture is:

X:\Recovery\Logs - Copy the exchange logs from the backup to here
X:\Recovery\Database - Copy the database from the backup to here

After the files have been copied i followed the instructions on these web pages to setup the dataabse as a recovery database within the production Exchange environment.

http://msexchangeguru.com/2010/05/23/exchange2010-recovery-database/

http://msexchangeguru.com/2009/07/12/exchange-database-recovery-using-eseutil-commands/

http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2011/02/working-with-exchange-2010-recovery-databases-2/

The problem with exporting mail from a recovery database is the fact that you CANT!!

You have to restore the mailbox from the recovery database to a temp mailbox on the production database THEN you can use the cmdlet "new-mailboxexportrequest" to export the mail to PST.

There is an explanation within the last web page regarding the cmdlet used to restore mail from the recovery mailbox to the production investigation mailbox which I've pasted below and highlighted important parts:

Restore-Mailbox -RecoveryMailbox “1234, test” -Identity ex2010 -RecoveryDatabase RecoveryDatabase -TargetFolder “RecoveredItems” -StartDate 1/1/2010 -EndDate 12/31/2010

A few things to note about the command above:

First off, the source and target mailboxes can get a little confusing. Think of the Recovery-Mailbox as the source mailbox, and the Identity mailbox as the target mailbox. When entering my command, the contents of test1234 residing in the recovery database were restored to a subfolder called RecoveredItems in the mailbox called ex2010.

Second, the Recovery-Mailbox switch only accepts the Display Name of your source mailbox. Using the Exchange Alias will not work. If you try to use anything other than Display Name you will receive an error similar to the following:

Mailbox “test1234” doesn’t exist on database “RecoveryDatabase”

Believe me, this will frustrate you because you will see the mailbox definitely exists if you use the Get-MailboxStatistics command. Microsoft does not document the fact that the Restore-Mailbox switch only accepts Display Name very well so hopefully this will save you some time.

Once you have the hang of the procedure, it becomes easier to restore data as long as your backup is OK.

-Fr33ze

Office 365, Primary Email Address and Alias Email Addresses

We have a new client who we are moving to Office 365, part of the setup i have used DirSync to move their usernames to Office 365, I had run into an issue where i pretty much couldn't change anything because it was syncd with AD.  Well ok so what????

I decide to google away and found a couple of articles that i assume just scratches the surface of AD, DirSync and Office 365.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/410677-office-365-w-ad-sync-primary-email-address-woes

http://enterpriseit.co/office365/create-email-alias-dirsync/

The above articles explain using the proxyAddresses attribute within AD to add alias to email accounts within Office 365.

Basically you add the emails addresses to the proxyAddresses attribute in this format:

SMTP:main_email_address@company.com
smtp:alias@company.com
smtp:another_alias@company.com

Note:  Using upper case SMTP denotes Default Reply address.

-Fr33ze

Changing networks from Public to Private.

I was trying to access a Windows Server 2012 R2 box from behind an IPSEC VPN and i though that was going to be hard but it turns the hardest thing was trying to make this standalone server change its network profile from Public to Private.

In the end i followed this guide specifically "Option 4", the onyl thing to remember is to restart the computer.

-Fr33ze

Renewing Web site and Exchange SSL certificate in SBS 2008

I referred to this page http://www.setoreaustralia.com/?p=394 for my settings.  As i need to just add another basic cert not the root certificate which you would run the connect to internet wizard to complete this.

-Fr33ze

SBS 2003 Hyper-V P2V Intergrated Services and Error 1625

I had this error after P2Ving an SBS2003 and trying to load the integrated service into it from DS Restore mode.  For some reason the security policy had embedded itself so much that i couldn't load the MSI's.  After looking around for error code 1625 on the internets i found that it was obviously somethign to do with the Local Security Policy but quickly foudn out that it wasn't going to allow me to load these services.

After an hour or 2 i started the system up in normal mode and ran the services install, it ran fine and didnt seem to affect AD in any way.

Always try to install these services in DS restore mode so that you can sort the network connections and have AD work correctly.

-Fr33ze

Restoring Exchange on SBS2008/SBS2011 after moving databases to new drive

We had a client lose power and for some unknown reason it decided to trash the C: Drive of the SBS VM.  So after recovery of the C: Drive using shadow protect, the system booted fine.

I was expecting an issues but this one annoyed me a bit.

After starting up i noticed the exchange databases were not mounting, after trying to mount it and it saying that there were missing committed transaction logs i realised that i had only restored the C: drive which restored older logs and the main database being on another drive was the current version and had already committed logs that now didn't exist.  This occurred because we had to restore from 11am and the power loss occurred at 11:50am which meant that the 12pm backup didn't run.

After figuring this out for 2 hours (OMFG 2 hours), i then mounted through SP both drive and exactly the same point in time from the backups.  I then copied both the log folders and the database folder to their respective places in the system and SUCCESSFULLY mounted the databases, unfortunately there was a loss of email, but a small loss is better than no database.

So to sum up when restoring an exchange database that is split on 2 different drives make sure you are either restoring ALL Hard drives or restoring the entire database directory and the log directory from the SAME point in the backup.

-Fr33ze