Author Archives: Jeremy

iRedMail on Nginx

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This is my experiment to get iRedMail to work with Nginx. In the end I got everything to work other than awstats, although with some caveats. I don’t like awstats very much and it seemed quite troublesome to get it setup. There is a mode to run awstats in that lets it just generate static files, which to me seem to be a better solution. I did testing only on Debian 6.0.7, although it should also work in Ubuntu just fine. It was also limited testing on brand new VMs.

So I am starting out with a brand new Debian 6.0.7 system. First things first we setup our hosts and hostname file. For my test environment I used mail.debian.test as my test environment. Then I grabbed the latest iRedMail which happened to be 0.8.3 at the time of writing this. I did this via wget in a ssh session. I had to install bzip2 to “tar -xf” it, so a quick “apt-get install bzip2” resolved that. I then ran the iRedMail installer and let it complete.

Now to stop apache services for good:

Optionally we can run “apt-get remove apache2” to get rid of apache binaries as well.

Now, I needed Nginx and php5-fpm (as I prefer fpm). This takes a little work as Debian 6.0.7 doesn’t have it in its default sources. This would have been easier on Ubuntu.

What I did her is first install nginx and curl. Then I added dotdeb to the sources list, added its key and then updated my sources. Finally I was able to install fpm.
Now that the applications are in place, I need to write their configuration files. Here is the list of files I will be using:
Nginx’s iRedMail site configuration file
php5’s FPM iRedMail web pool file
iRedMail init.d file to launch the iredadmin pyton webservice

During additional testing I uploaded the files and just used curl to put them into place. The init.d script is borrowed from the web (exactly where I can’t remember as I used bites and pieces from multiple places). However I don’t feel the need to write out or explain in great detail all off the changes.

You will need to modify the nginx file (/etc/nginx/sites-available/iRedMail) to contain the correct domain. As well you will need an additional dns enter for iredadmin.domain.tld (in my case iredadmin.debian.test). If this is your only/first ssl site or you prefer it to be default you will need to adjust the ssl section. I added comments to explain that. Nginx expects a default website and if none exist it won’t start.

As for the additional domain, I tried my best, but it seems there is no way to have the perl script to be aware its in a sub directory and pass the correct urls to its output templates. Although the template has the capability to do a homepath variable, this seems to be set from ctx in perl which from my limited knowledge I don’t believe is changeable via environment/server variables. I also didn’t see a way to change that in any setting. Hopefully the iRedMail developers can make this change in future versions.
The good news is the iRedMail developers had foresight to setup the script to run very smoothly as a stanalone python web server via a cgi socket. So no additional work to make that run is needed. I had hoped to use the iredapd service to launch this, but it appears to crash and fail horribly. So I setup a second instance to do this.

Now just a little more work to activate the new service, link the file as a live nginx site and restart some services.

Thats it. Now when I hit mail.debian.test I get the webmail portal. When I access iredadmin.debian.test I get the admin portal. phpmyadmin is also setup on mail.debian.test/phpmyadmin

Setting this up for Ubuntu should be easier, as 12.04 has php5-fpm in its packages so there is no need to add in the dotdeb resources. Everything else would be the same for it.

Nginx has always been flaky for me while doing Ipv6 services. I intended to include them but it just wasn’t playing nicely enough. Sometimes just doing [::]:80 to a listen will make it listen. Other times I have to specify it twice (and it doesn’t complain). Then again if I try it on 443 using [::]:443 nginx may not want to start at all, while it accepted [::]:80 just fine. So because of how picky it can be at times, I just opted to go with ipv4 only support here.

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Dynamics CRM notes change ownership unexpectedly

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I stumbled across a weird issue with Dynamics CRM 2011. I thought it was due to Rollup 12 as it only recently started happening, but it appears to be default behavior (whether I noticed it before or not). Basically the steps to reproduce this are very simple.

User A

  1. Create a case with some basics
  2. Add some notes
  3. Add the case to the queue

User B

  1. Access the queue
  2. Click Assign in ribbon
  3. Assign case to yourself.
  4. Save and close.

After a short while the case notes that once where owned by User A, now are owned by User B. Thats not what I expect to happen. I expect the notes to stay the same.

Well it appears there is a simple work around to this. Although not what I wanted to change, this does get around it.

  1. Go to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize this system
  2. Navigate to Entities -> Cases -> 1:N Relationships
  3. Open Notes
  4. Change Relationship from Parent to Cascading.
  5. Change the Assign from All to None
  6. Save and close
  7. Publish all Customizations (may not be needed but just to be sure)

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Hyperlinks in CRM 2011 Rollup 12 do not work in Safari

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One of my co-workers who use Safari way more than I do pointed out today that he couldn’t click links in Safari on his Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion. I was able to reproduce this as well in my Safari. Starting my debugging I noticed if I opened the developer console the links worked, which didn’t help me much. I made sure popups where disabled and no luck as well. Finally thinking maybe I had an extension in Safari causing it, I tried disabling all extensions. Again nothing was working to resolve the issue.

By chance I happen to stumble on a workaround at least. In the progress of debugging this, I changed my user agent, the page refreshed and it worked. I realized something, after opening the debug console it refreshed the page as well. So closing Safari and opening it again, I again came upon the page and couldn’t open any links in CRM. I hit F5 and let the page refresh. Once the refresh completed all the links worked. Not sure why, but a refresh seems to resolve this.

Note: My co-worker couldn’t use F5 in his Safari. I believe I remapped it at one point in Safari as its F5 in all other browsers and just like it that way. I believe the default is Apple + R.

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Chrome closes with CRM 2011 Rollup 12

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Doing more testing with CRM 2011 Rollup 12, I found out that Chrome was self closing when I logged into CRM. This is very annoying, but having worked with CRM before in IE, I knew what this was. By chance I was able to verify it by going to the CRM url and changing the last part of the url to /main.aspx. I got a notification that a popup was blocked. Sure enough, after I added the crm address to the popup blocker exception list, no more self closing windows.

Update 2/14/13: Also should note that this affects Safari as well. Popupblocker’s cause quite a problem with CRM and there is no notification what it is about to do. I find the fact that CRM needs to launch into its own window a pain. I personally have it in a pinned tab in Chrome. I don’t worry about it and when I need CRM its there and not on some other obscure window.

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Using Chrome on CRM 2011 Rollup 12 will repeatedly show login prompt

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While testing out CRM 2011 Rollup 12, I noticed that I could not get it to log me in for Chrome. After checking my security log and resetting Chrome back to defaults, it still didn’t shed any light onto why this was happening.

After much searching, I happen to find the article explaining this. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2709891/en-us?sd=rss&spid=15707

While this requires a registry edit and supposedly opens up a man in the middle attack, it does indeed fix it. Hopefully a proper fix comes out in the near future to resolve this properly. In the mean time this works well.

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The specified storage repository scan failed

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This one has been bugging me for a while. I had a CIFS based ISO share. For some reason the share would fail to update now and then with the error message “The specified storage repository scan failed”. A restart of the CIFS system would fix it, but none the less it wasn’t a solution. Other google results mostly pointed to NAS/SAN issues and not a CIFS share issue. I thought that the windows system was to blame because of the connections limit it has on non server editions.

While I was manually browsing the CIFS share I noticed something. There was a file on the share with a file name being a UUID. The file contained nothing and I checked and sure enough I was getting this error at the time. So I copied it somewhere else and deleted it. A rescan worked without any errors. No more errors and new files show up right away when added to the ISO share.

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Mapping a drive letter to a SharePoint Document Library

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I was looking for a way to accomplish the need of making it easier for users to access a SharePoint Document Library, with the plus side of being able to add this into a GPO and letting it be mapped across the domain. Of course you can add a network location to a SharePoint Document Library, but I didn’t know of a way to script that via a GPO logon script. I really didn’t research much into that, I figured mapping drives would be easier to explain to users.

It turns out this is really simple to do. The SharePoint server maps it as a WebDav path on a network share. So by using \\SERVERNAME\DavWWWroot\ I got the root of the SharePoint site. From there, I just filled out the rest. Such as \\SharePoint\DavWWWroot\Shared&20Documents links to the Shared Documents library on the SharePoint site.

From that point on, its as simple as using a GPO to deploy this and map the drive.

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Adding search to Dynamics CRM Customer Portal

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So I needed to add a search box to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Portal. So into Visual Web Developer 2010 Express I went. I opened the Customer Portal project and then expanded Pages and eService in the tree.

Opening up ViewCases.aspx I located the following

I added this before that:

I then opened the code for the file (right clicked and showed code) and located the following:

and added before that:

Saved the files, built the code and tested. Everything worked just fine, except for an error that occurred because the view I had, used follow up by and some of those cases didn’t have them. If a search returned only results with no follow up by set, it would give an error. But I just swapped out the follow up by for modified on.

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OEM like branding in Windows 7

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I needed to figure out a simple way to set the default background image. I didn’t want to force the background image, I didn’t want to apply a GPO, and I wasn’t having much luck editing the default user hive. I happen to stumble onto this solution by chance, really. So into regedit we go for this.

The location I am looking for is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes]

You may need to add keys, but in general you want the below keys to be set. I set DesktopBackground, but excluded it in this example because it contained a path I didn’t want to post. This is just a hex string that contains the full path to a file using the oobe folder is recommended. The oobe folder may not exist on your system, so go ahead and create it if needed.

“Drop Shadow”=”FALSE”
“Flat Menus”=”FALSE”
“SetupVersion”=”10”
“InstallTheme”=”C:\\Windows\\resources\\Themes\\aero.theme”
“InstallVisualStyle”=”%ResourceDir%\\themes\\Aero\\Aero.msstyles”
“DesktopBackground”=hex(2):
“BrandIcon”=”C:\\Windows\\System32\\oobe\\info\\logo.bmp”
“NoThemeInstall”=dword:00000000
“ThemeName”=”Theme Name”
“WindowColor”=”Slate”

Using this plus other OOBE branding, I was able to make a bat file which upon running completely sets up branding on the System Information panel, theme and default background.

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Execution ‘‘ cannot be found (rsExecutionNotFound)

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While configuring Reporting Services on a server running Windows 2008 R2, I came across this issue. After some searching I found out Microsoft has a kb article about this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972328), however it mentions only applying to MSSQL 2005. Well the Server I had had MSSQL 2008 R2, as well as SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010. It seems that this fix also still works. So if you are confused as to why this is happening and think the article doesn’t apply to you, give it a shot anyways.

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