Pandora One App on Ubuntu 12.04

I had been wondering how to get the Pandora One desktop app to work on Ubuntu.  The problem I kept running into was getting Adobe Air to install on my 64-bit Ubuntu system.  Thanks to a helpful how-to over at Librarian Geek the problem is solved.  To install Adobe Air and Pandora on your 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 system run open a terminal and enter in the following commands.

Add the repository to your system:
sudo apt-add-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ $(lsb_release -sc) partner"

Update and Install Flash & Reader(if desired)
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer acroread

Download Adobe Air:
wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/latest/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin


Set the installer to executable:
sudo chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Run the following for 64-bit systems:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0

Or for 32-bit run:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0 /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0.2.0

Run the Adobe Air installer:
sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Install Pandora App:
Download the Pandora App here and run it to install. 

That should be it.  Enjoy Pandora on Ubuntu!

Office 365: Set Password Never Expires

I had a client decide to use Office 365 for their hosted Exchange solution, but did not like the password change requirements the service had. I did some searching for a way to set the passwords to never expire and while there were a few places that had directions, none seemed to have a complete set listed step by step so I thought I would post them here in the hopes that maybe they can help someone else.

• First you need a system with Microsoft Powershell installed. You can download this and find installation instructions for Powershell here.
• Then you need to have the Microsoft Online Services Module installed which you can download here.
• Now you will need to run the following commands in order.
• $LiveCred = Get-Credential - You should then be prompted for your Office 365 admin credentials.
• $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection - You should see a few messages about redirection and then be returned to the prompt.
• Import-PSSession $Session - You will again see a few messages on screen and should then be returned to the prompt. At this point we are connected and ready to work.
• Connect-MSOLService - Connect to the MSOL Service
• Get-MSOLUser - This will provide a list of the users and their User Principal Name which we will need for the next step.
• Set-MSOLUser -UserPrincipalName user@domain.com -PasswordNeverExpires $true -StrongPasswordRequired $true - This will change a single user account's password to never expire. If you want to change all user accounts use the next command.
• Get-MSOLUser | Set-MSOLUser -PasswordNeverExpires $true - This will set all accounts to have non expiring passwords.
• Remove-PSSession $Session - Clean up and close our session when done.

I am not a Powershell expert, but these steps in that order worked well for me so hopefully they are helpful to someone else as well.

Intel iMac Restore

My wife came to me one morning after she had been on her computer working on a graphic design job that was due that day. Her computer had started acting up and when she restarted she got a grey screen, a picture of an apple and a spinning gear below. Then nothing. She restarted a few times and even left it for 20 minutes and nothing. After some internet research we tried restarting in safe boot, single user mode, and a few other options. All of which started to boot and then would fail. We found the Mac OS X install discs and booted off of disc 1. Once the DVD was booted we ran the disk utility from the Utilities menu. We tried the verify and the repair options. Both of which would start to work and then just hang. At that point we decided the hard drive was probably either bad, or had unrepairable file system damage. We had a backup from Time Machine to an external hard drive so we felt pretty comfortable that we had most of the data backed up. However I never like to delete all my data until I know I have it so we decided we would spend the $65.00 for a new hard drive and restore from the backup to that.

NOTE: It appears Apple really does not want you messing around with the internals and thus it is not obvious by looking how to open the case. Also, opening the case will I believe void any warranty you have with Apple so I don't recommend it, however this computer was long since out of warranty and I could not wait days for a repair at an Apple store, so we decided to venture on our own.

Disassembly

The first order of business was to identify the hard drive type to ensure we purchased the correct replacement. Easy right? Open the case, look at the drive, and then head off to purchase the appropriate replacement. Yeah, we got stuck on step 1, open case, this was going to take a while!

The older Macs had three screws on the bottom that you would unscrew and then the back would come off. This 20" Intel iMac had only one screw on the bottom that opened up to upgrade the memory. No other visible way to open the case. After a bit of internet research it appears the screws to open the case are under the glass cover on the screen. The magic tool needed to get at them is a suction cup to remove the glass screen that is cleverly held into place with magnets.

SIDE NOTE: If I were the designer I would not put magnets around a computer that uses magnetic storage, but I am not a high paid engineer and it seems to work okay. But this seemed really counter intuitive to me.....

We found a suction cup at the local Ace Hardware store and pulled the glass cover off the screen which uncovered the screws to open the case. At this point there were about 12 torx head screws to remove the case.

With the screws taken out were were able to remove the front part of the case. To remove this we found the memory slot on the bottom needed to be opened. This was the one screw visible from the outside of the case and is directly above the stand. We started at the top of the case and seperated it. It seemed like part of it was still head together by the magnets so a little gentle force was needed. Then we were able to separate the bottom and remove the cover.

There was a wire for the camera when we removed the case. We flipped the case up and laid it down as shown below. We chose not to worry about disconnecting the camera cable. With the front of the case removed we next were able to see the eight torx screws that hold on the LCD.

Once we removed the screws that hold the LCD in place we were able to lift it up and reveal the rest of the components and the area we were looking to get at. There is one pair of wires connecting the LCD at the top and another pair of wires connecting the LCD at the bottom. We disconnected the top ones to lift up the LCD, but left the bottom cables connected, and I just had my wife hold it up while I removed the hard drive.

The hard drive is in the middle at the top. There are two torx screws and a plastic rail that hold it into place on the top side. The other side of the hard drive towards the bottom of the Mac is set into place with some peg type screws. At this point the hard drive removal was pretty easy, just remove the torx screws and a little slight of hand to remove it. Once loose the SATA and power cables disconnected easily. You can see a foam thing stuck to the hard drive. This appeared to be a temperature sensor under the foam which I carefully removed to preserve some sticky and just stuck it on the new hard drive in a similar fashion.

Once we had a new drive re-assembly was easy and just the reverse of what we had done. We had read some horror stories online that doing this, the case would never go back together the same and would leave scratches etc on the case. We did not find this to be an issue. Set it on a soft location (we used a bed) and just be careful.

Restoring the System

With the new drive in we were still concerned about getting everything back up and running. Once we had the Mac put back together we plugged the computer back in and turned it on with the OS X install DVD 1 in the drive. We held the 'C' key to get it to boot off the DVD.

This took a few tries. We had a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and it took a few times to get the keyboard working to get the 'C' key press recognized and get it to boot off the DVD. The first few times we would get a grey screen and a flashing image of a folder with a question mark in it. My thought was 'Yes, you cannot find any files or folders on the hard drive. Probably because it is new! Why not try booting off the DVD?', but it didn't. We just powered off a few times and finally got the keyboard working and booted to the DVD.

At this point the remaining steps were pretty easy, I didn't think about it at first but the drive needed to be Mac formatted. To do this we went to the Utilities menu, and selected Disk Utility. In disk utility it has an erase option so I used that to get it to format the new drive with a Mac file system and to label the drive.

With the drive formatted we exited Disk Utility and again on the Utility menu of the Mac OS X DVD there was 'Restore From Backup'. We selected that and it walked us through connecting our Time Machine drive which once we plugged it in it found right away. On the next screen it asked us to select a full backup to restore. There had been one at 6:08am that morning so we selected that. It asked us where we wanted to restore to, and we selected the new hard drive we had formatted. It took it a few minutes to look at the backup we wanted to restore and the new drive and ensure there would be enough free space. Once it was happy we were able to continue.

Last it warned us that this would erase all data on the hard drive. Being a new hard drive I was not concerned and we had it proceed. The restore took almost two hours to run. The progress indicator gave us a percent complete and an estimated time to completion. We found the time to be way off, but the percent complete progressed slowly but surely.

When the restore was complete we were prompted to restart. This was the moment of truth. After holding our breath for a few minutes, sure enough my wife's desktop started to display, all her files, and all her programs! This was truly the easiest full system restore I had ever done! Microsoft could learn a thing or two from Apple!

At last we had a working system back again and were very happy. Only thing was my wife had a few files she had been working on that morning that were not in the backup. I have a USB to SATA adapter cable and we took the old drive and used the adapter cable to plug it into the computer via USB. It took a few minutes but it finally mounted the old drive. We were able to browse through its file system and find the few files she needed and copy them to the new hard drive.

In the end it was a bit of an experience having never had to recover a Mac before. But turned out to be only a $65.00 replacement hard drive and a little effort on our part and we had a no loss restore! Very happy in the end and very impressed with how easy it was to do. With it that easy, I don't know why Apple makes it so hard for users to be able to do their own hard drive replacement. I guess you do want to be careful inside as you are taking things apart and putting them back together again!

Hope this helps someone else out there restore their Mac. Lesson, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP, especially since it is so easy with Time Machine to do backups and restores!

Exchange 2007 Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) Not Working

I ran into an issue when setting up an Exchange 2007 server on Windows Server 2008 where I could not get the Outlook Anywhere to work. In Exchange 2007 setting up Outlook Anywhere is supposed to be much easier than it was in previous versions, but no matter how many times I set it up, I could not get it to work. Now there are many possible reasons why Outlook Anywhere may have issues. I will list some of the more common reasons first, as if you are reading this you are probably experiencing issues just like I did, and then I will go into the bug which haunted me.

If your Outlook Anywhere is not working, first have you installed the Rpc Proxy windows component? Have you setup your firewall to forward incoming connections on port 443(ssl) to your Exchange Server? Have you purchased a certificate from a trusted CA and does it include the required subject alternative names? Outlook will not connect to an Exchange 2007 server using Outlook Anywhere if the certificate cannot be verified by a trusted certificate authority. Meaning you cannot use the Exchange 2007 server’s self-signed certificate to connect. Lastly have you gone through the wizard in the Exchange Management Console to configure and enable Outlook Anywhere, or configured it from the Exchange Management Shell?

If all of the above are done and you feel certain you did them correctly, then maybe you are experiencing the same bug I did with Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008. First a little background on the environment. The setup I had was two Windows Server 2008 servers on the network. One server was setup with Active Directory, DNS, and Global Catalog. The second server was setup as the Exchange Server running the Mailbox role, the Transport role, and the Client Access role, a default configuration for Exchange 2007.

The issue I ran into is one that is not well documented, and took me weeks to find the answer to. What finally pointed me in the correct direction was I stumbled on a blog article here from Aaron Marks, who deserves great credit for posting a walkthrough that helped to diagnose and fix the problem. I only wish I had found his blog post sooner. I suggest reading his walkthrough as he goes into more depth than I do, and he has links to related information.

The short version is that Server 2008, just like Vista gives preference to IPv6, but when you enable Outlook Anywhere on the Exchange 2007 server, it does not listen for RPC over HTTP on IPv6. The solution? If you are not using IPv6 in the organization and you want Outlook Anywhere to work, you need to disable IPv6. To do this you would think you just uncheck the box from the interfaces, but that does not totally disable IPv6, or so it appears. In the registry go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters then add a 32-bit D-WORD DisabledComponents and set the value to 0xff. This disables all but the loopback. To disable IPv6 on the loopback modify your HOSTS file. Find the line ::1 localhost and put a # in front to comment it out. After doing this I restarted the server to make sure everything took effect. At that point, as long as everything else is configured correctly, Outlook Anywhere should start working.

I hope that by posting this, others will not spend as much wasted time trying to find a solution like I did.

BackupExec Shows Empty Selection List

I have been upgrading customers servers lately, and it seems I have been doing a lot of Server 2008 installs. Overall the installs have gone well, however on almost all when I install Backup Exec on the new server and try to create the backup job, the selection list is empty. Now I know there are locations from which to backup files, especially since the hard drives are attached directly to the server, so why will Backup Exec not let me select them?

In Backup Exec, where I expect to see the selection list all I see is a message that says, "Connection With Server Failed". Turns out there can be many reasons for this message ranging from Windows Firewall, to permissions. In these cases I am singed in to the server with Administrator privileges so I at first think it cannot possibly be a permissions issue. However all times for me it has been.

First things to check for troubleshooting are that the Backup Exec Services are started and running. I know seems like a no brainer, but in troubleshooting you have got to cover all bases. You also want to make sure that the services are starting with the appropriate service account. What I found to be the best help in resolving this issue is the following article on Symantec's site. http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/254239.htm

Essentially there are some group policy settings that are not set, and thus the users do not have the appropriate permissions to create and view the selection lists. At first blush it seems like the article may not really apply as it seems like it is outdated, but the steps in it worked to resolve the problem for me on multiple occasions.

To fix the issue you want to edit the Default Domain Controllers group policy. In the Default Domain Controllers group policy you want to select Computer Configuration, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, User Rights Assignments. The you want to find "Act as part of the operating system", double click and verify the desired user is there, or add it if not. Then you want to do the same thing for the following additional user rights assignments; Backup Files and Directories, Create a Token Object, Logon as a Service, Manage Auditing and Security Log, Restore Files and Directories, Take Ownership of Files and other Objects. Once you have verified the appropriate user is added to all of those, from the command prompt run gpupdate /force and then restart the Backup Exec services and you should be able to see your selection lists.

I believe this is only an issue on Domain Controllers, but not sure. I never used to see this issue on Server 2000 or Server 2003 with the older versions of Backup Exec such as 10, 11, but have been seeing it regularly on Server 2008 with Backup Exec 12 and 12.5.

Outlook Not Displaying HTML Email Correctly

I had a customer who had an issue where some HTML emails that were being sent to him would not display correctly. Instead of seeing the HTML email with images etc, they would see the HTML code in the email message. They were using an Exchange 2007 server and Outlook 2003 as the email client.


There was much beating the head against the wall on this one, as it would only do it on some HTML messages and not on others. In troubleshooting we went through many steps trying to find the culprit. As it turns out, Outlook has an option to force it to display all emails in Plain Text. Meaning, even if you receive and HTML email, it will force the display into Plain Text mode. To adjust this setting view the Microsoft article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831607.


With this customer we checked this setting, it was not set, and yet some messages would not display in HTML. On the effected emails we would check the message headers and the MIME type would still say that the message was supposed to be HTML, but outlook would not view it as such.

This customer accessed their email on the Exchange server from more than one computer. One of the computers was their home computer. After much troubleshooting we discovered that the HTML emails were being mangled when they were read on Outlook on the home computer through a VPN connection. The only way we discovered this was to read an HTML message on Outlook Web Access from the home computer and see that it displayed correctly, we then read the message on Outlook on the computer and it did not display the message correctly, go back to OWA and now the message was damaged and would not display correctly.

Turns out the user had AVG running on their home computer and had updated to version 8.0. Version 8.0 has an option to certify that it has checked messages. When AVG certifies a message it puts its stamp at the bottom of the message that says, "No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG". It was when AVG would add this text to the bottom of the message that it would damage the format of the HTML message and cause the message to no longer display correctly in Outlook or OWA.

To resolve this issue, in AVG if you go to the AVG User Interface and go to Tools, Advanced Settings. On the left hand column select Email Scanner, and then un-check Certify E-Mail. This stops AVG from adding its text to the bottom of the message and causing the message to become mangled. Another alternative for fixing would be to disable AVGs scanning of incoming email, or disable the AVG add-in to Outlook. However those options would stop AVG from scanning email and possibly open the user up to the risk of opening an infected email message. By turning off the Certify E-mail AVG will still do its job, but not effect the message.

I hope this post will be helpful to some other people and save you the amount of headache and time we spent to find this simple fix. I am not sure if the issue with AVG adding its Certification message to the bottom of emails affects only Outlook and Outlook Web Access, or if it would have the same effect on other email clients as well such as Thunderbird. If anyone has an answer to that please post a comment.