Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Outlook 2010 does not send emails with exchange server

Outlook 2010 and 2013 have a realy nasty bug.

The effect when connected to a exchange server shows up in the inability to send out emails.
Incomming mails in cached mode just work fine, and outlook tells us in the status bar "Connected to server".

When you write a mail, it just gets stuck in the outbox and tells us about a communication error with error code 0x8004011D, meaning that the server is not available.
Just plain rubish, otherwise we would not have incomming mails and in the status bar it would not show "Connected to server"





When you create a new profile for the user, it works a few days, until again it blocks at this point.
When you create a profile without cached mode, it will work with no problems as well, but that's not the intention to have a cached mode.

The solution to this mistery are linked mailboxes.
When you create a profile and add the linked mailboxes as independent account's in outlook, you will get in troubles. It looks like outlook internally adds the linked mailboxes to the profile too, and then has double accounts and messes up things.

The solution is simple: Just remove the additional mailboxes from the outlook profile and mails will be sent out just as you would expect.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Ever needed to convert a VHD file to a real harddisk?

You probably know the scenario:

The client has started a small project and needed a new server for this.

In these days you useally go for a VM running on a server, and (since it uses few resources) you place the disk content of that VM into a file in the filesystem.
Since it's a small project with small load this is the ideal (cheapest) solution.

A few months later, you realize that this project is not as small as the customer tolds you or is requiring more and more storage place.

So you add more physical disks to the server and make a dedicated mirrored drive for that (once small) VM.

And now you have to transfer the content of the VHD file into the real disk, so you can directly access it with best performance from the VM.
Since MS did not provide a tool for this conversion, you need another tool for it.

There are serveral of them, the simplest GUI tool is Vhd2disk from Sysinternals.

Here is the link to the forum with the download links.



The conversion is very simple, just make sure to select the correct target disk, otherwise you will miss some other data!

Once restored you can change the disk in the Hype-V manager and (if required) expand the volume(s) to take advantage of the additional space.