iPhone, Android, Windows Phone high data usage due to "Exception message: Maximum request length exceeded"

by Ed Sparks

A significant flaw exists in the design of Exchange ActiveSync, in our opinion, ​in that most mobile devices - particularly the iPhone - will leave a large message stuck in the outbox and continuously try to resend the message over and over without limit until the user deletes the message.

This issue is most commonly caused by the default IIS configuration on Exchange CAS servers ​that limits incoming messages to about 4-10MB in size (depending on version) - regardless of the limits set elsewhere in the Exchange organizational or user configurations.  You will know this is the problem if you see the following event frequently in your Exchange CAS Application event logs:

EVENT LOG Application
EVENT TYPE Warning
SOURCE    MSExchange ActiveSync
EVENT ID  1008

​

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Dynamics AX Enterprise Portal in a Farm - The rest of the story

by Ed Sparks

I was recently working with a customer to get the Microsoft Dynamics AX "Enterprise Portal" working correctly in their multi-tier production SharePoint environment. 

We quickly discovered this was not a well-documented or particularly easy task, as Microsoft seems to think everyone will just blindly install this with defaults in a SharePoint Foundation Instance on the AX server itself.  As this isn't a very scalable or common solution, we decided to investigate and find a proper supportable and reproducable way to install EP into a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise environment. 

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Linkedin Hacked: Why you should download Lastpass immediately!

by Ed Sparks

From Forbes and others...​

It’s been a rough day for Linkedin, first with news that its iOS app collects full meeting notes and details from a device’s calendar and sends them back to the company in plain text. Then later news that more than 6.5 million passwords were reported compromised.

Norweigan IT website Dagens IT first reported the breach, noting that “Two days ago a package on the 6.5 million encrypted passwords posted on a Russian hacker site. Those who posted it wanted help to crack the codes, which is common in such environments, says password expert and consultant in Evry, Per Thorsheim. - Unfortunately, they are in a format that makes it relatively easy to break them, he said. According Thorsheim there is much to suggest that passwords are derived from LinkedIn, the great social network for professional users. It could mean that many lucrative users now are at risk for ID theft.”

​We highly recommend, use and pay for the the excellent password manager LastPass.  It's available on every platform - including mobile - and automatically generates and stores strongly encrypted passwords for all of your websites in the cloud.  It will also audit all of your existing sites, and tell you how much you're re-using your passwords.

Find out more and download it here.

Why the Facebook iOS app is so terrible

by Ed Sparks

Found this the other day, and thought it was interesting.  As Facebook's shares continue to tumble.

This does​ point to a larger issue thought, how Apple is increasingly becoming the Microsoft of old, and artificially limiting third party products to ensure they don't work as well as native.  

Hopefully Apple and Facebook make nice soon.

So what is wrong with the iOS app?

    App is slow 

    Inconsistent information notification icons say there are new messages or responses, actual window does not show anything new.

    App is slower than mobile web site while everybody is used to speedy apps, the Facebook mobile web site is faster than iOS app, and offers almost the same functionality.

    Tons of other bugs scrambled views, photo upload, text boxes disappear, no sharing.

What is the origin of these issues?

1. HTML and UIWebViews without Nitro JavaScript engine

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Exchange 2010 Rollup Crash Service Recovery

by Ed Sparks

A common problem we see at client sites (particularly those running IBM hardware for some reason) is when Exchange 2010 Update Rollups are running, the server will blue screen in the middle of the update, leaving the various services in disabled and broken states, and effectively killing the functionality of the server. Microsoft never seems to have acknowledge or resolved this issue, and it can be highly frustrating.  

​Thankfully the solution is scriptable ahead of time, if and when it happens!   Also - always be sure to run your Rollup MSP files from an elevated command prompt or they definitely will fail.

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Hyper-V Templates - the free method

by Ed Sparks

​Microsoft obviously wants you to buy System Centre Virtual Machine Manager - SCVMM - really rolls off the tongue.  For a simple test environment, however, this simply isn't necessary and it's relatively straightforward to create templated VMS just using the built-in importing and exporting in Hyper-V Manager.  Combined with the fact that Hyper-V standalone is free, this is a total pro-bono solution!

​This was the simplest and quickest solution I found:
http://sondreb.com/blog/post/hyper-v-making-template-virtual-machines.aspx 

Source: http://sondreb.com/blog/post/hyper-v-makin...