Whats Missing in the Lync Client for Windows Phone 7

Microsoft Lync is one of those fantastic products that I yearn for. It cross cuts the entire communication eco-system and gives you fantastic integration across the Microsoft stack including SharePoint and the Office application suite, however much to my dismay we don’t use Lync in my place of work and instead use the mediocre Cisco CUCM. To this end, my only experiences with Lync in a real-world ‘anger’ situations are when participating in calls hosted by other companies using Lync, Microsoft themselves being the main player for me.

For a long time now, there has been speculation of a Lync Client for Windows Phone 7 being released and this week it finally hit the marketplace not only for Windows Phone 7, but also for Apple iOS devices, Android and Symbian.

The app looks great in the screenshots, showing the features on offer well, however one huge feature is missing for me. The ability to use the app as a Lync Attendee Client: See Lync offers two different clients. The full blown corporate use client and the Lync Attendee Client. If you use Lync in a corporate scenario you will have the full client, however if you are like me and only use Lync to participate in sessions hosted by others, you use the lighter Lync Attendee Client which doesn’t require credentials and is designed around guest access.

Sadly, the Lync Client app for the mobile handsets released this week is only suitable for full client use scenarios as told by the app guidance notes in the Windows Phone Marketplace:

IMPORTANT: Microsoft Lync 2010 for Windows Phone requires a Lync Server or Office365/Lync Online account and will not work without it. If you are unsure about your account status, please contact your IT department.

He being me, I decided to install the app and try it anyway, but sadly the prescribed guidance was correct. This was a sucker-punch to me, and I think it will limit somewhat the ability for people to use the Lync Client. My only hope is that a separate client is released which does give you the ability to participate in Lync sessions as a guest.

If you are lucky enough to use Lync in a full deployment, you can get the app for Windows Phone 7 from http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/9ce93e51-5b35-e011-854c-00237de2db9e.

by on December 13, 2011

tagged in , , , , , , , ,

Redirecting Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Web Access for Internal Clients

Windows Home Server 2011 features an impressive remote access site allowing you access to your digital media as well as remote access to your home computers. One of the components which allows all of this functionality to work is the Client Connector. This software element, installed on the client computers (which can be PCs or Macs for the record) enables the Home Server to backup your systems, along with enabling the features required on your system for the RemoteApp Remote Desktop Services connections to remote onto your PC from anywhere online.

In the Home Server Launchpad, the main user facing element of the Client Connector, there is a link for Remote Web Access which directly launches a browser session to the Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Web Access site, after you have configured your free homeserver.com domain with Microsoft and GoDaddy (this is configured using the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard).

In a normal home scenario with a router from your ISP or that you purchased elsewhere, clicking the Remote Web Access link will launch the Home Server Remote Web Access site using the homeserver.com domain you registered as the URL. In my not-so-normal home network, I use a Cisco PIX firewall as my edge device means I have a problem.

Unlike a router, the PIX cannot route packets back through the same interface where the packet was initially received.

This sentence from the Cisco PIX Frequently Asked Questions explains the problem in one. Clicking the Remote Web Access link launches the browser session to the correct URL, however because that URL resolves to the Internet IP associated with the outside interface on the PIX means the traffic flow is not permitted back through the firewall.

Being a Windows Systems Administrator, I like things on Windows, which means I prefer to run my infrastructure services like DNS and DHCP on the Home Server instead of allowing the router to do it. The DNS role in Windows Server 2008 R2 (the foundation for Windows Home Server 2011), and the DNS role in any Windows Server operating system for that matter allows you to create multiple zones for multiple domains to which the server will respond with DNS resolutions, and this is where the fix derives from.

The fix, or trick as the case may be, is to use DNS to reroute the client computer by resolving the homeserver.com domain name to the internal IP address of the Home Server, and away from the Internet side of the network, which ultimately will improve the performance of the Remote Web Access interface too.

On the Home Server, launch the DNS Manager console from Administrative Tools.

image

In the console, right-click on Forward Lookup Zones, and select New Zone.

In the New Zone Wizard on the Zone Type panel, select the Primary Zone option,

On the Zone Name panel, enter the full domain name that you specified in the Domain Name Setup Wizard from the Home Server Dashboard (in this example, I’m using server.homeserver.com).

On the Zone File panel, you can leave the default option to Create a New DNS Zone File.

On the Dynamic Updates panel, leave the option set to Do Not allow Dynamic Updates. This will help to prevent any rogue clients on the network from poisoning the DNS zone and directing your clients to the wrong IP address.

imageimageimageimageimage

On the Completing the New Zone Wizard panel, verify that you can specified the homeserver.com domain correctly. and then select Finish to complete the wizard.

Back in the DNS Console, your new zone will be visible. In the new zone, right-click and select New Host (A or AAAA).

image

In the New Host dialog, leave the Name field blank and in the IP Address field, specify the IP Address of your Home Server. This IP Address should either be statically assigned to the Home Server, or it should be configured as a DHCP Reservation on whatever device is running your DHCP Server on the network (although if the Home Server is your DHCP Server, then this should obviously be static).

Congratulations. Your internal clients will now be able to access the Home Server Remote the Web Access site, using the Client Connector user interface as Microsoft had intended, without a single packet touching the outside interface of your server.

If in your home network, you are using the router to perform DNS queries on your behalf, but your router prevents connections through the same interface that the connection was initiated as the PIX does, you could also implement this trick using the DNS HOSTS file, however this would need to be performed on a per client basis editing the HOSTS file. Using this example, the HOSTS file line item would be configured as follows:

192.168.1.100   server.homeserver.com   # Windows Home Server

Remember to flush your DNS cache on the clients using ipconfig /flushdns before testing your work regardless of whether you used the DNS or the HOSTS file methods to implement it.

by on October 16, 2011

tagged in , , , , ,

Circumventing Intel’s Discontinued Driver Support for Intel PRO 1000/MT Network Adapters in Server 2008 R2

In a previous life, my Dell PowerEdge SC1425 home server has an on-board Intel PRO 1000/MT Dual Port adapter, which introduced me to the world of adapter teaming. At the time I used the adapters in Adapter Fault Tolerance mode because it was the simplest to configure and gave be redundancy in the event that a cable, server port or a switch port failed.

In my current home server, I have been running since its conception with the on-board adapter, a Realtek Gigabit adapter which worked, however it kept dropping packets and causing the orange light of death on my Catalyst 2950 switch.

Not being happy with it’s performance, I decided to invest £20 in a used PCI-X version of the Intel PRO 1000/MT Dual Port adapter for the server. Although it’s a PCI-X card, it is compatible with all PCI interfaces too, which means it plays nice with my ASUS AMD E-350 motherboard, however I didn’t realise that Intel doesn’t play nice with Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

When trying to download the drivers for it from the Intel site, after selecting either Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 64-bit, you get a message that they don’t support this operating system for this version of network card, which I can kind of understand due to the age of this family of cards, however it posed me an issue. Windows Server 2008 R2 running on the Home Server automatically installed Microsoft drivers and detected the NICs, however that left me without the Advanced Network features to enable the team.

I set off my downloading the Vista 64-bit driver for the adapter and extracting the contents of the package using WinRAR. After extraction, I tried to install the driver and sure enough the MSI reported that no adapters were detected, presumably because of the differences in the driver models between the two OS’s. After this defeat, I launched Device Manager and attempted to manually install the drivers by using the Update Device Driver method. After specifying the Intel directory as the source directory, sure enough, Windows installed the Intel versions of the drivers, digitally signed without any complaints.

With the proper Intel driver installed, I was now left with one problem and that was still the teaming. Inside the package, was a folder called APPS with a sub-directory called PROSETDX. Anyone who has previously used Intel NIC drivers will realise that PROSET is the name used for the Intel management software, so I decided to look inside, and sure enough, there is an MSI file called PROSETDX.msi. I launched the installer, and to my immediate horror, it launches the installer which the autorun starts.

Not wanting to give up hope, I ran through the installer and completed the wizard, expecting it to again say that no adapters were found, however it proceeded with the installation, and soon enough completed.

This part may change for some of you – Intel made a bold move somewhere between version 8.0 of the Intel PROSet driver and version 15.0 of the PROSet driver and moved the configuration features from a standalone executable, to an extension in the Device Manager tabs for the network card. I poured open the device properties, and to my surprise, all of the Intel Advanced Features were installed and available.

image

I promptly began to configure my team and it setup without any problems and it created the virtual adapter without any issues too including installing the new driver for it and the new protocols on the existing network adapters.

With this new server, I decided to do things properly, and I’ve configured the team using Static Link Aggregation. I initially tried IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation, however the server was bouncing up and down like a yoyo, so I set it back to Static. Reading the information for the Static Link Aggregation mode is a note about Cisco:

This team type is supported on Cisco switches with channelling mode set to "ON", Intel switches capable of Link Aggregation, and other switches capable of static 802.3ad.

Following this advice, I switched back to my SSH prompt (which was already open after trying to get LACP working for the IEEE 802.3ad team). Two commands completes the config: one to enable the Etherchannel and one to set the mode to LACP instead of PAgP.

interface GigabitEthernet0/1
description Windows Home Server Team Primary
switchport mode access
speed 1000
duplex full
channel-group 1 mode on
spanning-tree portfast
spanning-tree bpduguard enable
!
interface GigabitEthernet0/2
description Windows Home Server Team Secondary
switchport mode access
speed 1000
duplex full
channel-group 1 mode on
spanning-tree portfast
spanning-tree bpduguard enable
!

The finishing touch is to check the Link Status and Speed in the Network Connection Properties. 2.0Gbps displayed speed for the two bonded 1.0Gbps interfaces. Thank you Intel.

image

by on August 5, 2011

tagged in , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Trials and Tribulations of Installing Windows Home Server 2011

As I sit here now in my study at home, I am blessed by the new soothing sound of my self-built Windows Home Server 2011 system. And why is the sound soothing? Because it’s silent. My rack is still making some noise, which is coming from the Cisco switch and router which both probably need a good strip down and de-dust to help with the noise, it is nothing compared with the noise of the old PowerEdge SC1425 that I had running.

Unfortunately, installing Windows Home Server 2011 for me wasn’t smooth sailing, and I hit quite a few bumps along the way, so here is the list of problems I faced to help others avoid the same time wasters.

Before even starting the installation, please make sure you do read the release notes. Ed Bott has gone through some of the crazy requirements in a post at ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/before-you-install-windows-home-server-2011-rtfm-seriously/3134). The biggest one to watch out for is the clock.

Due to some kind of bizarre issue with the RTM release of WHS 2011, you must change the time in your BIOS to the time for PST (Pacific Standard Time) or GMT –8hrs. You must then leave BIOS and consequentially leave the Windows clock to that time, and during the installation when prompted for Time Zone, you must set this to Pacific Standard Time.

Once the installation is complete, you must then wait a further 24hrs before changing the time back. If you chose not to heed this advice, then the release notes state that you will not be able to join any client computers to the Home Server during this 24hr period. Once your 24hr period is up, you can log into the server and change the time and the time zone accordingly.

The first problem hit at the first phase of the installation, Extracting Files, while it was at 0%. Reviewing the error log from the setup process, I saw that it had encountered a (Trackback:80004005) Setup Error 31: Trackback:80004005 error. A quick look on the Microsoft Social Forums led me to discover that WHS 2011 doesn’t support any kind of RAID or array type disk to be attached for the installation. For me, this meant disconnecting the RAID-10 controller and powering down the disks attached to the controller for the duration of the install. Once install was completed, I simply reconnected the controller and installed the drivers and everything is working perfectly as I expected.

The second problem occurred once the installation was complete and it runs the WHS 2011 customisation process after first logon. It seems that WHS 2011 goes out to Windows Update and pulls a couple of required updates, and as such, needs a suitable network card. My motherboard uses a NIC which isn’t natively supported by WHS 2011, so I had to install the driver, however to my shock, the initial lack of a NIC terminated the setup process and I was forced to restart.

As my existing home server and the new home server where to be using the same IP address, I had the new one disconnected initially. This caused the next problem, because after installing the NIC driver, I was given a prompt that there was no network connectivity and that I should connect a network cable. Once again to my shock and disbelief, this required another restart.

At this point, I also released that my Cisco switch had switchport-security turned on for the Home Server port still and this meant I had to disable that on the switch as it was bound to a different MAC address at the time, and guest what? Reboot again.

My final problem laid with the network card on the motherboard itself. In the BIOS, I enabled the maximum power saving mode setting. It turns out, that for the ASUS E35M1-M PRO motherboard, this prevents the network card operating in 1Gbps mode and drops it to 100Mbps. It took me a while to figure this one out with changing cables, switching between switch ports etc, but I eventually discovered an option under the network card in Device Manager for Green Ethernet. Disabling this setting, which was previously set to Enabled, reset the network connection, and it was then connected at 1Gbps.

After all of this, I have a fully working and perfect home server for me and the family. I’ll be writing some other posts to explain my setup in detail, but this post is purely for the installation process

by on June 25, 2011

tagged in , , , , , , ,

Cisco SCCP IP Phones Displaying Incorrect Time

In our office in the little old place known as England, we use Cisco 7941 and will soon to begin using 7942 Cisco SCCP IP Phones . The company uses Cisco Call Manager 6 or CUCM for those in the know. In our local office we are using a Cisco technology called SRST or Survivable Remote Site Telephony.

This technology, SRST allows our IP handsets to fallback to operating with a locally situated CME or Call Manager Express device so that if our Internet connection to our corporate head office fails then we still have limited telephony functionality.

One issue that has always plagued us here is that our phones would show the US time and date from our West Coast, San Jose based CUCM. Although only a minor issue it meant that call logs didn’t show the time you would expect nor did the phone if you wanted to look at the time.

When speaking to our IT department they couldn’t put their finger on a fix, so after researching online initially I suggested to them that a Device Profile be created on the CUCM to force the handsets to use United Kingdom locale instead of the US one. The change was implemented but the phones still show the US time, so what gives?

Upon reading some more information online today, I discovered that the key is the SRST device: A Cisco 2801 Integrated Services Router in our case. When a phone is associated with an SRST device, the SRST registers itself as an additional CUCM on the phone. For me, this appears as a third Call Manger as we have an Active and a Standby Call Manager in a cluster in our US office. When using SRST, the phone knows that the SRST device will always be closer geographically to the phone than the CUCM, hence the whole point of having SRST and once this is established, the phone will always learn the date and time from it’s local device.

Using the following command on the router I was able to see the problem that when the router was configured by our US colleagues they left the time zone setting on the router to Pacific by default, which would seem normal for them:

uk-srst#show clock
05:01:44.254 PST Fri Aug 13 2010
uk-srst#

This means that the time zone on the SRST 2801 needs to be changed to GMT for our country, England, correctly. This is done using two commands – The first command sets the time zone to GMT. The second command enables summer time or daylight savings as some call it, and uses the BST or British Summer Time variant of daylight savings:

uk-srst#config t
uk-srst(config)#clock timezone GMT 0
uk-srst(config)#clock summer-time BST recurring
uk-srst(config)#end
uk-srst#
uk-srst#show clock
13:01:44.254 BST Fri Aug 13 2010
uk-srst#

As you can see from the IOS output above, after entering the two commands, the clock is now using BST for British Summer Time. Saving the running configuration and then rebooting all of the effected SCCP IP Phones will apply the new date and time zone settings accordingly.

by on August 13, 2010

tagged in , , , , , , , , , ,

SIP VoIP for Home and the Day of Sadness

Today is a sad day, because yesterday I came up with an evil super plan, however today I realise that it just cannot be.

My evil super plan was this. To purchase a SIP line from an ISP, configure my Cisco 2651XM with CME and have the SIP line trunked into the router. From here, I was going to replace our existing Windows Home Server with Windows Small Business Server 2008, which I would install Office Communications Server 2007 R2 onto.

The combination of SBS and OCS would give us the ability to use Unified Messaging (UM for Exchange) and would allow us to use the Office Communicator client on the desktop and Office Mobile Communicator on our Windows Phone devices. I would then have configure the 2651XM and OCS to trunk the SIP line between each other using guides available online for configuring OCS and CME to talk so that inbound calls on the SIP line would be routed to the OCS server.

This just gets better now, because the second part of the plan was to configure a hunt group in OCS which would group both me and Nicky together. If someone were to ring the home phone, it would ring both of us simultaneously and then the first one to answer receives the call (that’s the hunt group at work). If nobody answered then the caller could leave a voicemail on the OCS server which would be delivered to both me and Nicky to our SBS Exchange mailboxes using UM.

Just stop for one minute to think of the power and the feature set am talking about here?

  • Imagine being able to answer your home phone anywhere in the world from either your PC or mobile?
  • Imagine being able to receive voicemails left on your home phone from your inbox anywhere in the world via PC, mobile or Outlook Web Access from an Internet cafe?
  • Imagine making phone calls to numbers anywhere in the world just like using a normal telephone but at the fraction of the cost?

Continue Reading

by on April 28, 2010

tagged in , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using SDM with GNS3 and Dynamips in Windows 7

I am currently experimenting with the GNS3 and Dynamips network emulation platform to help me get to grips with some of the Cisco IOS commands for my CCNA, and I ran into a problem yesterday.

Parts of the ICND1 exam require knowledge of the Cisco SDM GUI application, however as it stands you cannot access the routers and switches within your GNS3 environment.

A link on the GNS3 forum takes you to a video which someone has produced providing instructions on how to access and use SDM for your virtual routers, however instructions are for Windows XP and cannot be followed for Windows 7.

If you are using GNS3 and Dynamips then follow these steps to get SDM working.

Continue Reading

by on March 24, 2010

tagged in , , , ,

The Anatomy of UPnP Device Discovery

Since my Cisco ICND1 training last week, I’ve become somewhat obsessed. I’ve previously been looking at NETGEAR routers to replace my current FVG318 as I am hitting the concurrent connection limit on it almost daily. Due to now seeing a little piece of Cisco, I figured why not look at getting a Cisco router so that the router will be more reliable and also will help give me some on the job training.

Everything was looking good until I thought about UPnP. I use UPnP quite heavily at home: Not for the port forwarding but for the internal advertisement of network services (namely media streaming to the PlayStation 3).

I discovered a few articles which outlined that Cisco doesn’t support UPnP on any of its devices and that it looks like there is no plan to add support for it either which is a bad thing if you are an SME looking for easy to deploy networking products but good from a security standpoint I suppose.

To test, on the FVG318, I disabled UPnP and had Nicky test the media streaming, however it didn’t work so today I took it upon myself to test this to ensure I can actually achieve full functionality using a Cisco 2651XM.

Continue Reading

by on March 23, 2010

tagged in , , , , , , , ,

Windows 7 Makes the Most of Unified Communications

Unified Communications seems to be one of the hottest topics around and Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 R2 is Microsoft’s offering, however OCS 2007 R2 isn’t what’ I’m talking about.

I’m talking about how Microsoft have made a quiet few tweaks in Windows 7 to make using communications products that little bit nicer.

Continue Reading

by on March 26, 2009

tagged in , , , , , , ,

Cisco VPN Client and Windows 7

So I was searching today for something specific to the Cisco IP Communicator software phone version of the Cisco IP 7941 to see if there is a way to make it work nice with Windows 7, but in the process I found a lot of threads and blog entries about problems with the Cisco VPN client causing BSOD’s with ndis.sys.

I’d just like to say that I’ve got the Cisco VPN client installed on my Windows 7 Build 7000 machine without any issues. I can connect and disconnect as many times as I like without issue.

This is actually better than the experience in Windows Vista where the Cisco Virtual Network Adapter for the tunnel kept failing meaning after every connect/disconnect cycle I would have to reboot to get the adapter going again before being able to connect again.

This hit me worst at home if I roamed between my two Wireless AP’s where the WPA2-PSK authentication takes a little bit of time and the tunnel would drop during the roam.

In a nutshell…..Cisco VPN client just works in Windows 7, just like it should do.

by on March 25, 2009

tagged in , , , , , ,