Author: Adam Fowler

VisiPatch 360 Panel

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

This is our new Patch solution – VisiPatch 360 by Systimax http://www.commscope.com/Product-Catalog/Enterprise/Brand/SYSTIMAX%C2%AE-Patching-Solutions/VisiPatch-360%C2%AE/

I spent half of a weekend setting this all up, but it’s a pretty awesome system. For us, we have it so the middle yellow area goes back to our switches, and the top/bottom blue parts go out to the floor outlets. We connect a yellow to the blue patch port we want to make active, and it’s done. It makes moves and changes really easy.

20130318_173012[1]

 

The metal doors open to both left or right, and come off completely – that’s where a lot of the cable mess hides, but there’s a lot of room and nothing really gets tanged.

I’d recommend having a look at a system like this if you’re building a new comms room, or redoing one from scratch.

Lync 2010 Response Groups and Ringing

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I’ve been knee deep in Lync 2010 lately, and one thing I was working on was setting up some Response Groups. Simple enough, people call a number and it goes through to a few different staff on various extensions. The main annoyance from people calling the new Response group was the Music On Hold. As soon as you ring and hit the response group, you’re put on hold – it should be ringing on the phones of the members of the response group, but the caller hears on hold music. This can be confusing for people, so the easiest thing to do is to switch the Music On Hold to the exact same noise Lync uses when a phone is ringing.

This is done by modifying Step 7 in the Response Group:

lync response group

 

You can find the Lync WAV files on any computer with Lync 2010 installed, under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Lync\Media\

* Updated 4th March 2014: Stephen Dolphin in the comments below nots that the Lync 2013 path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\MEDIA *

COMMUNICATOR_ringing.wav is the default one that most people will be familiar with. Otherwise you can find a normal ringing phone WAV file from anywhere and use that, such as this one:

Ringing

After doing this, the callers don’t actually know they’re in a queue unless you’ve enabled other settings in the Response Group to make it obvious.

Enjoy.

Searching for Duplicate MAC addresses with Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I ran into an issue today where a server was complaining about a duplicate MAC address. Since almost all of our servers were virtual, I thought the best step (after doing an arp -a command locally and seeing if the offending IP address/MAC address was listed – which it wasn’t) would be to do a quick Google to see if there was an easy way without checking each VM.

Of course there is, thanks to Powershell. I quickly found this blog post from The Daily Admin and gave it a try. There was one slight change I had to make to get it to work:

Using the “Virtual Machine Manager Command Shell” I tried the command from the link above:

Get-VMMServer | get-vm | Get-VirtualNetworkAdapter | select name,EthernetAddress | export-csv “c:\temp\VM_Macs.csv”

It prompted for a Computer name. After working out you needed to specify your SCVMM server in the first part after ‘Get-VMMServer’ as per this:

Get-VMMServer “ScvmmServerName”| get-vm | Get-VirtualNetworkAdapter | select name,EthernetAddress | export-csv “c:\temp\VM_Macs.csv”

It worked perfectly. The resulting CSV file had a full list of the MAC addresses, which helped me narrow down what I was looking for.

 

Full credit to The Daily Admin at http://www.thedailyadmin.com/ !

 

 

Setting Lync 2010 PINs via PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I am currently in the process of rolling out Lync, and wanted an easy way to mass set everyone’s PIN number. Rather than setting everyone’s PIN to a single number, I wanted part of it based on their extension number. The solution I used was writing up the below PowerShell script to use in the Lync Server Management Shell.

So, why would you do this? When you want everyone to know what the PIN format is, and not accidently log in with the wrong extension due to typing it incorrectly once (they have to type it incorrectly twice).

This is what it does:

I had to import the activedirectory module because the get-csaduser command didn’t get the results as a string, meaning I couldn’t do the substring command on it.

Then, it get the two properties of officephone (needed for the pin) and the samaccount name (same as username in lync) from the users in the specified OU.

For each of those results, it sets the officephone number from Active Directory as the $phone variable, then it sets the last 3 digits of the $phone variable as the $ext variable and sets the samaccountname as the $username.

Finally it runs the set-CSClientPin command based on the username, setting the pin to 99 and the 3 digit extension.

 

You can’t set the pin to match the extension exactly as Lync will refuse to let you. You could modify this quite easily to just have everyone’s pin as 1234.

 

import-module activedirectory
$users = get-aduser -filter * -properties officephone,samaccountname -searchbase “ou=users,dc=yourdomain,dc=com,dc=au”

foreach ($user in $users)
{
$phone = $user.officephone
$ext = $phone.substring($phone.length -3,3)
$username = $user.samaccountname
Set-CsClientPin -identity $username -pin 99$ext
}

 

Happy Lyncing!

Windows 8 – Folder In Use

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

Since using Windows 8, I’ve had continual issues when trying to move folders around. It’s the normal message saying “Folder In Use – The action can’t be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program”

File in Use

I’d get this continually, and quite confident that I didn’t have anything actually open. Eventually I’d try again and after a few tries, it would finally move my folder. I was fed up with this, so thought it was about time to work out what was going on. Someone (thanks Barb) reminded me that Process Explorer was a good way to work out what file was open. I ran Process Explorer, moved a few folders until I recreated the error and did a search for the folder that was in use. I found that explorer.exe had the thumbs.db file open, even though I hadn’t navigated inside the folder.

Thumbs.db? It’s been around for ages (since Windows 95!) and is a thumbnail cache file used for Windows Explorer’s thumbnail view. This was also deprecated from Windows Vista and above, replaced by a centralised thumbnail location instead of dropping the Thumbs.db files all over your hard drive. The problem is, Vista and above still create the old Thumbs.db by default!

Windows 8 seems to be even worse, in that it still creates the file but then keeps it open for a rather long time. After finding this thread on Technet, where I learnt a lot of the above, I enabled the setting “Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files” under > User Configuration > Administrative Templates  > Windows Components   > File Explorer.

After doing this then rebooting, my “Folder In Use” issue seems to have completely cleared. I can understand why this is enabled by default (backwards system compatibility), but it does seem strange that Windows 8 keeps the file open for such a long and random time.

So, as long as you don’t have anything below Vista accessing your files, go ahead and enable the setting.

Update: More detailed instructions from AJ below.

Hit Win+R, type gpedit.msc in the Run window and click OK. The Local Group Policy Editor will be launched.
Navigate through the tree to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > then either Windows Explorer (Windows Vista/7) or File Explorer (Windows 8)
In the right-hand pane, double-click “Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files”.
Select Enabled (don’t make my mistake of choosing “Disabled” — you’re enabling the switching off of Thumbs.db. Not particularly intuitive, Microsoft!)

Update 2: You can also use this registry setting:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableThumbsDBOnNetworkFolders"=dword:00000001

 

Update 3: For those of you unlucky enough to have a Windows 2000 server still, there is an option in Windows 8 allowing connections to 40 bit fileservers. Check this post for details: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/9925-file-sharing-connections-encryption-change-settings-windows-8-a.html

Update 4: Here’s a screenshot of the registry after being modified. You can ignore the other entries under ‘Explorer’:

thumbs