Adobe Acrobat DC Fill & sign Tool missing

Acrobat DC has a nifty tool to allow placing of saved signatures on documents.
After a recent laptop replacement, one user couldnt find the tool to place the signatures needed.
The issue came out to be that Acrobat removes the tool if the language setting of the applications is not set as English only. The application here was set to English & Arabic
You have to go to Edit->Preferences->Language
The Application Language option should be set as English Only
After restarting the program, the Fill&sign option appeared in the Tools Section

Ref: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1945290

Renew expired Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate

Today our Exchange servers refused to send out emails to the user mailboxes. After going through the logs, Warnings popped up for Exchange OAuth, which said that SMTPReceive connector was failing because of a certificate issue.

So Exchange server installs a server authentication certificate used for Organizational Authentication for itself and other Exchange servers in the organization for intra-site communication, during initial setup

Usually these certificates have a 5 year validity. Upon expiry, some services start failing to work as needed.

Following the link and steps below, i was able to get  the services up and running again.

ref: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/512374-missing-the-microsoft-exchange-server-auth-certificate

New-ExchangeCertificate -KeySize 2048 -PrivateKeyExportable $true -SubjectName "cn= Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate" -DomainName "*.yourdomain.com" -FriendlyName "Microsoft Exchange Server Auth Certificate" -Services smtp
Do not accept to replace the SMTP certificate when prompted
2. Note the thumbprint of the new certificate. Let us assume it is 7A39541F8DF58D4821967DD8F899B27410F7C081
3. $a=get-date
4. Set-AuthConfig -NewCertificateThumbprint 7A39541F8DF58D4821967DD8F899B27410F7C081 –NewCertificateEffectiveDate $a
Accept to continue despite the fact that the certificate effective date is not 48 hours into the future
5. Set-AuthConfig –PublishCertificate

6. Make sure to remove any potential reference to the previous certificate (which might not exist anymore) by doing Set-AuthConfig -ClearPreviousCertificate.

Access Denied Error on Exchange Management Shell for Exchange 2013

So I tried opening the EMS tool on our Exchange server and i was getting the dreaded Access Denied error. I was also unable to open the Exchange Toolbox.

First issue i noticed was that the server time was off by 6 minutes. So I got that fixed first.

w32tm is the utility used for that.

But that didnt help with the original error

After having enough of going through the logs for errors, and getting fed up of googling, i came across a forum which talked about two modules used by IIS to support authentication on the Powershell Folders under the Default WebSite, and the Exchange Back-End Site

1. WSMAN
2. KERBAUTH

So I left KERBAUTH module on for the Powershell Folder under Default Website and removed WSMAN module from there.
I enable KERBAUTH and WSMAN for the Powershell folder under Exchange Back-End

Both modules have to be native and local when enabled. You can find them under the Configure Native Modules setting on the right side pane

Its better to run iisreset after any change to the IIS settings to be sure of the effects of your changes.


After setting this combo, both EMS and Toolbox started working.

QuickParts button in Word 2013

I got to know about a nice feature in Word while looking to solve a problem for a office user.
The user wanted to include customized header and footers so that they could be selected from the header drop down list

The Quickparts button is available under the Insert Tab .

Select the content that you want to replicate later. Click the QuickParts button, choose Save to Quick Part gallery.

Then the building blocks menu comes up, and you can change the Gallery to which it is saved. Choose the Headers Gallery, and give the selection a name to be referenced to later.

Once saved, the selection will be available for all future documents. This however requires you to save these changes to a file called BuildingBlocks.dotx, which Word will ask for when closing the program.

The new custom header will now be available under the Headers drop down menu.

Even footers and tables can be customized in a similar manner.

For further info, please have a look at this link from TechRepublic.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/office-q-a-adding-custom-headers-to-words-headers-gallery/

Cisco 881 with Thomson Speedtouch ADSL

The requirement was to have the Cisco 881 WAN port control the PPPOE connection, and have it's IP as the external IP of the connection. The Cisco 881 however does not have an analog telephone port so as to directly dial the connection. The CPE here that was provided was an Thomson Speedtouch ADSL router. The Cisco WAN port is connected to one of the Thomson ethernet ports.


If the PPPOE connection is configured on the Speedtouch as well as the Cisco 881, then there will be a fight between the two, to control the connection, the result being that the connection will keep dropping, expecting one of the two to dial.

What needs to be done is to setup the Thomson Speedtouch as a bridge, using the Easy Setup wizard on its web interface. This way, the only router that will dial the connection is the Cisco router and hence will receive the external IP of the ADSL connection on its WAN interface.

Fujitsu-SAN!

I got an opportunity to setup a Fujitsu Eternux DX 80 Storage with a Fujitsu RX 200 server. Once the storage was out of the box, it was just a matter of putting up the railings and slowly placing the storage onto the grooves. Since the hard disks come pre-configured, there was no need to install them separately. I connected a laptop to the MNT port for configuration and setup an IP in the default IP range of the MNT port ( 192.168.1.1). Logged on to the web-interface using the default u/p combo (root/root). Setting up the RAID config and the volumes was quite easy, thanks to the detailed but well thought-of setup wizard.


Now the MNT port is used only for management through a direct connection to a device like server/desktop/laptop and cannot be connected to a switch. For that there is a RMT port which can be setup for remote configuration. Also , the MNT and RMT ports can't be on the same subnet.
trust me, I tried!

Now comes the part of setting up the volumes so that the server can see them. This setting is know as host affinity where we can set up the volumes in such a way that they can be 'reserved' for certain hosts. Very useful in the case of when the storage is connected to a fibre switch. This is done by using the feature of the fibre card known as WWN or World-Wide Name. This basically identifies the fibre card installed on the server to which the volume has to be associated to.

Once the volumes are setup , we needed to wait until the formatting is done.This took a while because one volume was 4TB and the other was 2TB. I tried setting up the server to recognize the volumes but it wouldn't show up. The formatting took a while to complete. Im not sure how long because I came back the next day to check, and it was done.

My first misconception was that the Storage volumes would show up during the HBA scan that usually happens when the server starts up. But after a little bit of reading, I found out that only certain fibre cards support this feature whereby you can actually boot from a SAN!


So in this case, the server OS had to load the drivers for the Fibre card , only after which the volumes could be detected. This server was running Ubuntu Server 11.04, so drivers wouldn't really be a problem.

Once the host affinity was configured and the volumes had completed formatting, the volumes showed up under devices folder on the server.

Shazam!

My brother bought a Nokia X3-02 recently, and he was going through the Nokia Ovi Store, and found an interesting app,called Shazam (www.shazam.com) they've got apps for mobiles and the pc. it's an online service, which can by listening to any song clip or part of a song, identify it and give you the song details.

The wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service) makes for interesting reading. Apparently there's something known as acoustic fingerprints for audio files.