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Here’s a gem.
The overall point of this blog post is:
Bonus:
If you have a Lion server behind a NAT router (for example, an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule) that is running a VPN service you may have difficulties connecting to it with Windows 7 using L2TP despite the correct setup.
I won’t go into the deep dive on this now, but just a total quick tip. You need to change the encapsulation parameters on Windows 7. Do that by setting a registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\PolicyAgent]
…add a new DWORD value:
“AssumeUDPEncapsulationContextOnSendRule”=dword:00000002
Description of Update Rollup 4 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3
It looks like Exchange 2007 SP3 RU4 has a lot of goodies in it. At least 5 of the items in this list are impacting the environment at my day job.
While it’s good to see progress, I’m always wary of these updates because of the regression bugs they often introduce. Test and patch carefully, gang.
A coworker sent this along. I’ve had this issue on a few contacts and didn’t really have time to delve into it.
Name removed to protect the innocent and good intentions. Be very careful with this and make sure you have a backup of all data that you plan to manipulate.
—
After serially using every calendar/address book interface under the sun and transitioning to Snow Leopard with Exchange syncing, I ended up with a bunch of munged Address Book extension labels in my iPhone Contacts like:
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-AssistantPhone>!$_
The extra long labels forces the text to be tiny, and rarely displays even then to say whether this is the work/home number.
If you encounter this problem and you’re a Mac user with a Unix background, I’m sure you can think of a dozen ways to fix this … else see some rudimentary Address Book/iTunes/command line steps below to handle large numbers of Contacts at once.
–
The munged contacts had labels like:
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-AssistantPhone>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessFax>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessHomePage>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessPhone>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-EmailAddress1>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-Home>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-HomePhone>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-MobilePhone>!$_ item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_
… the bracketing parts are the problem. I can live with “HomePhone” versus “Home Phone”. YMMV.
Correcting this involves a few steps and a tiny bit of command line stuff:
- Attach your iPhone to your computer. Let it sync. Leave iTunes open.
- Open Address Book, select all your contacts, then File->Export to your Desktop, call it “backup.vcf” — don’t touch this file — if something goes wrong you’ll restore this.
- Do a second export of all the contacts to another file “munged.vcf”, or some name equally meaningful to you.
- Open a Terminal window, and cd to your Desktop (“cd ~/Desktop”). Just for paranoia’s sake, type “more *.vcf” and use the space bar to step through the files, making sure they contain all your contacts. Type “ls *.vcf” to confirm the files are the same size. Yeah — sheer paranoia, but who wants to reenter all their contacts? 
- In the previously opened Terminal window paste this command and press return:
cat munged.vcf | sed -e 's/EX-//' | sed -e 's/_$!<//' | sed -e 's/>!$_//' > fixed.vcf
In case you want to mess with any other fields/changes, vcard format is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard.
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Glad it helped 
I’ve just run into this problem myself. I have about 2000 contacts that originated in Exchange, but are now local “On My Computer.” In Apple Address Book the labels appear correct, but when I sync them to Google Contacts or export them as VCF or CSV for manual import to Google, the field labels are all mangled with the nonsense so when I use Google Sync to get them on the iPhone, none of the contact info appears in the right place or at all since the labels aren’t getting mapped properly.
I tried the original fix from Vermyndax and it didn’t really help – although it did strip the brackets and clean up the labels a bit, it still doesn’t match to the Google Contacts labels, so it doesn’t fully solve the problem, since the labels still don’t match when synced to the iPhone, and it’s still a hot mess
So I tried joetekk’s solution since that appears to be specific to Google Contacts, which is ultimately where I need them to be correct since I really need them to sync between Address Book and Google and over the air via Google Sync to the iPhone. Unfotunately, when I run joetekk’s script, I get an error and I’m not Unix savvy enough to know how to fix it The error I get is
sed: 1: “‘\n”: invalid command code ?
If either of you are available to assist, I’m at the point of being willing to actually pay someone to to get this cleared up! I’m happy to contact one or both of you directly via email. Thanks!
macsamurai, will you keep me posted if you find a fix? i have this same problem and cannot for the life of me find a solution.
macsamurai: I had the same problem. The issue is with the “smart quotes” in the code above. Replace all occurences of:
‘
and
’
with:
‘
hmmmm. Still did not work for me.
-bash: s/_??_//: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessPhone/Work/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessPhone2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessFax/Work: No such file or directory
-bash: s/BusinessFax2/Work: No such file or directory
-bash: s/MobilePhone/Mobile/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/MobilePhone2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/EmailAddress1/Work/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/EmailAddress3/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomePhone/Home/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomeFax/Home: No such file or directory
-bash: s/HomeFax2/Home: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Custom: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Work2/Other/: No such file or directory
-bash: s/Work: No such file or directory
sed: option requires an argument — e
The final file that I do get in the output has no information in it. Any other hints?
So, I don’t mean to continue to rail on Vista like I did about a year ago, but something absolutely ridiculous happened to me today.
I’ve been doing some hard drive recovery for my dad’s old NEC Windows 98 system. (I had to do some recovery on another system as well, but that one didn’t go so well).
So I finally get the hard drive extracted via the handy dandy Newer Technology Universal USB 2.0 Hard Drive Adapter… which took about 5 hours to copy a little under 4 gigabytes. This is after I had to research why “Program Files” and “Windows” would not copy… only to discover that User Account Control prevents *any* copying or manipulation of *any* Program Files or Windows directory on *any* media. Instead of doing the copy, it would just stop without warning or dialog. Okie, whatever.
Anyway, so I get the 4 gigabytes extracted and onto the desktop. Now to burn it. I slip a dual-layer DVD into the drive and drag the folder to the drive location. It proceeds to do what seems to be another copy process. Only this time it says it’s going to take another damn 5 hours. For WHAT? To move the same goddamn files from my Desktop to a temp folder so you can burn it? Give me a fucking break.
So, I go away and finish watching Iron Man. When I come back, that 5 hour counter has now moved up to 1 and a half DAYS. Are you KIDDING me? Just to move files from my Desktop to a temporary location to burn to a disk (which is a stupid endeavor anyway)?
Screw that. I reboot into OS X, copy the files off my Vista64 partition and burn it to a DVD disk in minutes.
Really, Microsoft. What should have taken a mere few hours has literally taken me all day.
Fail. In a big way. Not just did it fail with the UAC issues on two directories I’m trying to rescue, it fails trying to even rescue data onto a DVD disk.
I’m so irritated with it, I’m surprised if that partition will even remain on my system.
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I’m all about negativity today. Sorry.
Anyway, I’ve had something nagging at me for a while now and I think I’ve just figured it out. Powershell is Microsoft‘s answer to having a dumb command line through the Win95 – Win2003 years and it’s quite powerful, as the name implies. Microsoft likes it so much that they makes most of the Exchange 2007 administration efforts in the Exchange Management Shell, a derivative of Powershell that contains Exchange-specific cmdlets.
I’ve long bemoaned to our internal support personnel… and… well, probably my Microsoft contacts too… about how discombobulated Powershell actually is. It’s like it was designed with no standard in mind for the commands – each developer wrote their own cmdlet with their own switches and methods to do things the way they saw fit.
But it’s actually worse than that. Now I’ve come to realize that the problem with managing Exchange from the shell is not only because of the lack of standardization, but because a great deal of this SHOULDN’T be done in a shell command. I’ve heard that Powershell was designed to attract Linux admins who prefer the command line and that’s fine. But I do not know of a Linux admin who would type a command to set a disclaimer on the entire Exchange organization, but rather he/she would edit a config file of some kind. That way, not only would the disclaimer setting be readily apparent and visible, but it wouldn’t take some obscure command to be executed to show me the meat of the option.
What tripped this realization was this “power tip” when I just went into the Exchange shell on one of our servers:
Tip of the day #58:
Do you want to add a disclaimer to all outbound e-mail messages? Type:
$Condition = Get-TransportRulePredicate FromScope
$Condition.Scope = "InOrganization"
$Condition2 = Get-TransportRulePredicate SentToScope
$Condition2.Scope = "NotInOrganization"
$Action = Get-TransportRuleAction ApplyDisclaimer
$Action.Text = "Sample disclaimer text"
New-TransportRule -Name "Sample disclaimer" -Condition @($Condition, $Condition2) -Action @($Action)
Why am I not looking in a config file for this information? Fail.
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One item you’ve probably learned by now if you’re an Exchange admin working on a 2007 deployment is that Microsoft has changed the behavior of the recipient update policy. Most of you won’t care about this and that’s just fine. You shouldn’t. I would dare say that if your Exchange environment is engineered well and planned out the way Microsoft probably expects it to be, you should have almost no issues whatsoever.
Consider, however, if you’ve deployed Exchange with some type of “non-standard” approach. Yes, please picture air quotes around that. We’re trying to be politically correct here. What if your Exchange deployment wasn’t, for instance, master of all mail within your TLD?
Let’s say you have a TLD of contoso.com. Now let’s say you set up an Exchange service forest called services.contoso.com (see my earlier post about why an Exchange service forest is a Bad Idea). Now let’s say that because there are many other businesses and entities within contoso.com that route their own mail, the decision is made that Exchange cannot be authoritative for all mail coming in to contoso.com. You need to forward it up to some traffic directors at the top level to determine where the traffic goes. Now you have Exchange installed in a service forest and you’re not authoritative for contoso.com. So let’s say you decide to become authoritative for mail.contoso.com.
Now your recipient policy probably says that when new users are created, give them a service.contoso.com and a mail.contoso.com SMTP address. What about the contoso.com address? Well, since you’re handling that elsewhere, a third party process has to come in and manually assign that address. Fine.
Now in 2003, once the user object is created and the addresses are stamped, RUS will never touch the object again and muck with it unless you forcibly tell it to do so. Believe me though, it’s rare in this setup that you’ll be running this manually.
When you begin to roll out Exchange 2007, you get a new issue. If you’re configured in this manner and make any changes to the user object… say… moving a mailbox or anything of that nature… then you’ll notice that RUS will take your user object and mangle it up according to what it thinks the SMTP addresses should be. It’ll reset the primary address. Fun. Now your users start to complain that their mailing list memberships are failing, their business cards are incorrect, yadda yadda. Yes, the behavior of RUS changed in 2007 from 2003. Take note of it, because if you’re set up in a wonky way that prevents you from being authoritative in your domain, this is going to bite you once for every user you have.
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And, I can guess at about how many users you have… D00d I bet you’ll be hitting the coffee!
I’m seeing screenshots on the web about Windows 7. In particular, the Paint and Wordpad applications are showing up on Paul Thurrott’s blog site.
I still have yet to find anyone who thinks the Office 2007 ribbon was a good idea. I mean anyone outside of Microsoft, that is. Well, and other than Paul Thurrott. Real-world users that I work with every day hate the bloody thing and I’m consistently asked how to turn it off.
So they’re going to continue with that in Windows 7? Great idea.
Continuing my recent tradition of expressing what are likely to be fairly unpopular opinions with my peers, tonight I’m going to rag on Google‘s “Chrome” project and tell you why this is a Bad Idea ™. I’ll try to keep this short (update: I failed). This is considered to be a discussion starter, not a final statement. I’ll probably elaborate on these discussion points on the next NO CARRIER, so be sure and give me some feedback here.
Key points:
The Browser War is Pointless
Anyone who still thinks the browser war is anything worth fighting is absolutely delusional. The whole point of having a web browser is to serve as an open portal to content, not to give your company the biggest tool at the urinal. The web was created for serving content regardless of what application you used to view that content. In that spirit, what’s the point of fighting over this?
I understand the key differences between browsers and that some browsers have perceived advantages over others. I understand that all too well. One of the things you used to give up when you made a conscious decision to be a Mac or Linux user was the fact that the de facto browser on the net that had no intention whatsoever of conforming to a standard is no longer in your pocket. Being a Mac or Linux user means you have more than one browser installed and you use the right tool for the job. The fact is, the right tool for the job shouldn’t matter because HTML…er, XHTML or whatever it is this week is a standard, right?
Companies do not live or die based on whether or not you use their browser. Well, unless you’re Opera, maybe. But I digress.
We all know Microsoft is starting to wake up to this fact and has indeed promised to help further this idea. That’s great. It only bolsters my argument then. It used to be that the browser war was about dominating in your interpretation of the standard. Now that’s less and less important because standards are being followed (well, in general). So… why bother? What does it do for Google to compete in this browser market?
I know the answer to this and so do you. We’ll talk about that later. But for now, just believe me. This market share thing is pointless. I felt the same way when Steve Jobs declared war on IE with Safari on Windows. That just upset me. All that does is tie a huge steel ball around Apple’s ankle and toss it in the ocean. Apply that to Google now too.
Moving on.
Browsers are “planet” apps
Browsers are becoming “planet” applications with lots of satellites (plugins). For example, I use MobileMe which hooks into Safari or IE for bookmark synchronization… but not Firefox! Many people I know and love prefer Firefox because of the various plugins that “better” their browser.
The point I’m trying to make here is that the browser is not a monolithic application. You spend time adding whipped topping and chocolate shavings on top to get it just the way you want to work with it. You’ve now installed satellite applications that better your experience for you.
Now along comes a new browser with no support for those satellites. You have a new planet that will support no moon. Are you going to pack up your cheese and move to it? What happens when Chrome doesn’t support your favorite plugins? Okie, fine. I know they have said they plan to support Firefox plugins. But will MobileMe bookmark sync work? Probably not. That’s so crucial for me that it’s a deal killer.
As a matter of fact, there’s a good solution to this – and it would help out everyone’s favorite argument: security. Don’t support these plugins. Just be monolithic and require extra functionality to be external to your application. That would change the game entirely… for the better.
A New Security Nightmare
The story you didn’t read the other day was how enterprise administrators everywhere were groaning about the release of Chrome. While they salivated about using it at home perhaps, what’s happening in the workplace is a whole nutha story.
Google woke up and unleashed Chrome on the world this week and millions of people downloaded it. I’ll bet a great deal of those people were at work when they did it. I bet they installed it on their work PC’s.
So. You’ve just taken a brand new application with no record of security (and let’s face it, Google’s security record is not clean)… an application that is now your portal to the most insecure and infested part of the Internet and added it to your company’s PC. You’ve just made your PC a tremendous liability and your enterprise administrator is likely ready to kick your ass.
The web is the most dangerous place on the net. Everywhere you look it’s teeming with viruses, javascript exploits, cross-site scripting bugs and other nasties. The web browser is the simplest and quickest way into your PC. So let me get this straight. You just installed that thing on your nice and secure corporate PC?
“Well, it’s not Internet Explorer, so I’m good!” you might say. Nice argument. Nevermind the fact that a large percentage of web exploits occur in Javascript itself. Guess what Chrome’s focus is? Making Javascript a “better experience” for the web browsing public. Did you just get a shiver? If not, you’re not paying attention.
Indeed, within hours of release, Chrome was proven to be subject to a carpet bombing flaw. Look it up if you don’t know what that is. I’m too fired up to bother linking it
A Cloud OS Should be Standards Based
Now we get to the strategic part of the discussion. This is where Google’s motive comes in. They’ve been building the “cloud OS” so to speak for years now. They envision a world where you can sign in with a single username and password from anywhere and use applications just as you would your desktop, complete with the data you work with. Chrome is their method of furthering that agenda.
That’s great, except that the cloud as a business data model hasn’t really shaken out to be a good idea.
I still do not know of any large enterprise business willing to put their data up on the public web. Better yet, I do not know of any large enterprise willing to compromise on SLA’s for their critical data. They’d better start thinking about that if they plan on moving to the “cloud.” The “cloud” has already shit itself more than once. Google, Amazon, Apple and all other types of cloud computing folks have had severe troubles recently. It’s an unproven model and with the way you hear people talk about it like it’s the second coming… you’ve got another dotBomb shaping up here.
Chrome is supposed to make Google’s cloud computing experience better, since Javascript was their focus and Javascript is their operating system. Neat. I’d suggest you stay off of other sites, since their new interpretation of Javascript and the Java VM could leave you open to all sorts of other vulnerabilities (see: security). How about you make sure that business model is intact before you put too much time and money into it?
Open Source – Who Cares?
A lot is being ballyhooed about the fact that Chrome is open source. Hooray! Why is that a win, exactly? Because you can send patches to Google? Think they’re going to include your code in their release when they have a fairly clear agenda?
Red herring, folks. They could give a shit about your code. They just wanted something else on the PR. Honestly, what does it buy them to be open source for this project?
It sure bought them an interesting blog post (see: security) about how everything you type is sent back to the Google mothership, including sites you visit. Shivering yet? Woo, aren’t you glad you installed that on your CORPORATE PC!?!?
And Finally…
Just in case you’re still wondering what the purpose might be of the Chrome browser and why you’re using it…
Google’s business model is advertising.
Think about it, H.I.
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I think you’re missing the point here.
Why a new browser? If nobody is innovating in the correct direction then the answer is to innovate. Microsoft and Firefox have NOT been innovating in the correct direction of where the Internet is taking us. Their “optimizations” to Javascript performance have been minor at best. Chrome comes out and runs roughly 10,000 times faster at Javascript than anyone else, how can that be a waste?
Standards based: Did you read the articles? Chrome is designed to be more standards based than any other browser out there. “I still do not know of any large enterprise business willing to put their data up on the public web.” – well I do. Actually SaaS models are slowly taking over in a lot of areas. Did you know that one nursing home chain recently moved all 800+ facilities to a SaaS “cloud” based solution for all of their healthcare management system?
Why open source? I don’t think Google really wants to have the most popular browser or the best browser on the market. I think the net result will be that they force Firefox to add their innovations into Firefox so that everyone wins. The open-source idea behind Chrome isn’t so much to allow you to change Chrome as to allow Chrome to change YOU.
If Google helps drive performance increases in the browser market including Firefox and IE then Google wins in their cloud services model.
If Firefox implements the Javascript VM that Google has had developed, think of where that would put Microsoft – WAY behind the curve. Javascript is (unfortunately) what runs the web in a Web 2.0 world.
Actually, I do get the point on the innovation – being forced to do so because others do not help their cause. I get that.
But actually, your final statement reinforces my point. Why didn’t Google work with Mozilla to petition them and make Javascript better on Firefox? That would have been a HUGE win and you wouldn’t have people installing multiple browsers for multiple functions…
…again.
Good write up Verm
Large Hospital Software Company Switches to Linux – OSS Ramblings
While I’m not as optimistic as my buddy Tony on the increase of Linux market share, I am definitely in line with him on the decrease of Microsoft market share. As I continue my march toward converting to an all-Mac environment at home, Windows has been relegated to not much more than a gaming console. Even that is somewhat doomed though, as I’m starting to discover some of the newest games have outgrown this almost 4-year old PC. That’s fine, I’ll just start gaming on the Wii and continuing on with my old games.
dtchild, 
dogeared, 
macsamurai, and 2 others are discussing. 
StevieMac, 
My good man, this blog entry saved my skin over the weekend… thanks for pushing me in the right direction!
I’m an Apple consultant, and a client of mine had some jack’d up contact info that was being pushed into the cloud on Google Apps. A majority of his lables were riddled with the EX- etc tags, and also being labled as such that they weren’t compatible with label fields in both Google contacts, Addr Book on his Macs, his iPhone, and his (goddamn) Blackberry. Here’s the script I used to fix it all:
cat original.vcf | sed -e ‘s/EX-//’ | sed -e ‘s/_$!!$_//’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessPhone/Work/’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessPhone2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessFax/Work Fax/’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessFax2/Work Fax/’ | sed -e ‘s/MobilePhone/Mobile/’ | sed -e ‘s/MobilePhone2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/EmailAddress1/Work/’ | sed -e ‘s/EmailAddress2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/EmailAddress3/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/EmailAddress4/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/HomePhone/Home/’ | sed -e ‘s/HomePhone2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/HomeFax/Home Fax/’ | sed -e ‘s/HomeFax2/Home Fax/’ | sed -e ‘s/Custom Phone 1/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/Work2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/Work Phone 2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessHomePage/Home/’ | sed -e ‘s/BusinessHomePage2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/Pager/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/Pager2/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/CompanyMainPhone/Other/’ | sed -e ‘s/CompanyMainPhone2/Other/’ > fixed.vcf