csvde to excel Human readable LastLogon or LastLogonTimestamp

I was given the task of making a human legible report of Users, OUs, and Last Login Times. Easy enough right? I logged in to one of the servers as an admin and ran

F:\>csvde -r "(objectClass=user)" -f output.csv 
-l cn,givenName,sn,n,ou,lastLogon

* note.. all that is on one line. I wrapped it because blogger was cutting it off.

That worked great, but excel choked on the dates. It turns out this is because the dates are not "normal" timestamp dates. "Normal" timestamps are based on the number of seconds since midnight on 1/1/1970. The timestamps in Active Directory in UTC format, a 64 bit number based on the number of nanosecond since 1/1/1601 divided by 100! For even more complexity, Excel's dates are based on the number of days since 1/1/1900. Arrgh.

As theoretical knowledge goes, that is all fine and good.. but how do we use it in excel?

The formula to convert from Active Directory LastLogon or LastLogonTimestamp is:

=IF(C2>0,C2/(8.64*10^11) - 109205,"")

Explanation:

• C2 is the cell that contains the Timestamp.


• The If() statement hides the value if the user has not logged in.


• (8.64*10^11) is the number of nanoseconds in a day divided by 100.


• 109205 is the number of days, including leap days, between 1601 and 1900. (Remember, 1900 is when excel dates "start")

That's it. Paste in your formula and format it as a date, or date/time. The times returned are in GMT. All of the other solutions I saw in my google searches pointed to a vbScript solution. Please leave a comment if this helps you.

Thanks,
Ellie

P.s. If you want it in Central US time (GMT-6), subtract 0.25 (That is 6 hours divided by 24 hours in a day). For Eastern time (GMT-5), subtract 0.208333333 .. (5/24).

Rpc over http and UCC SSL gotchas

Here is a quick note for those using UCC certificates for RPC over Http. The name of your rpc/http server has to be the common name of your ssl certificate, an alternative name will not work. Between this bug, the IPv6 bug, and the complete lack of any logging facilities, I am starting to get the feeling that this service was written by an intern. (and not a good one)

SOLVED: Blackberry Internet Service (BIS duplicate messages from Exchange

A number of my users have been reporting duplicate messages on their Blackberry handhelds when we reconfigured them to use our shiny new Exchange 2007 Servers. After some digging, a message was being re-delivered to the handheld every time the message was A.) Marked Read, B.) Replied to, C.) Found in a search. This occurs only with Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) users connecting to the Exchange server with IMAP.

As it turns out, Exchange is changing the IMAP message ID every time one of the above actions occurs*. This causes RIM to see the message as new and re-transmit it to the handheld.

The options to fix it are..

Switch BIS to POP3 instead of IMAP. But then deleted items sync won't work.
Switch to Blackberry Enterprise Server. $5k in software fees, more depending on your user count.
Switch BIS to OWA..

That last option is the most promising. Unfortunately, with Exchange 2007 and forms based OWA authentication (the default), the normal url https://example.com/exchange doesn't work. Neither does https://example.com/owa.

What does work... the magic bullet for BIS+OWA on Exchange 2007 is..
http://example.com/exchange/you@example.com

I have not found this tidbit on any forums or documentation, and I really hope it helps someone.

Good Luck,
Ellie



* Constructive criticism for Microsoft. You stupid cod-flogging idiots. Why in the name of potato would you do such a thing?! Did you even _look_ at the RFC? This is what IMAP flags are designed to do. Please, please fix this, print the RFC and use it to flagellate the committee that designed this AND the committee that approved it.

Upgrating old Ubuntu Lts server's ssh

A minor Ubuntu annoyance today.. I have an old Ubuntu LTS server that tripped a nessus scan because the openssh version was too old.

I did an apt-get upgrade, but the ssh packages wouldn't upgrade, failing with this error...

root@bna-fw1:~# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
linux-image-server openssh-client openssh-server

I checked in the /etc/apt directories looking for some reason why it was held back to no avail.. Then I checked dpkg -l openssh-server but the package wasn't marked as held either. Then I gave up and googled it. As it turns out, upgrading ssh requires you to install the oops-sorry-we-made-ssh-unsecure-won't-happen-again package openssh-blacklist package and apt-get "upgrade" can't install a new package. This seems like an open manhole waiting to swallow any sysadmin that blindly trusts apt-get upgrade for updates..

The command to fix it and upgrade openssh-server/client is...

apt-get install openssh-blacklist

-ellie

Updated: Exchange 2007 Splitting OWA and Autodiscover onto two different websites.

This post explains how I split Exchange Web services and Autodiscover into two separate websites so that I could use two separate SSL certificates ($30) instead of a $300 UCC certificate.

We have a wildcard certificate (*.foo.com) for our primary domain. Since we have a metric crapton of servers it saves us loads of money.

The exact minutiae of getting Outlook Anywhere working will be another post. Suffice it to say that A.) It has a showstopper IPV4/IPV6 bug out-of-the-box and B.) Wildcard certificates do not work with Outlook Anywhere.

Happy to have that particular learning experience behind me and $15 later we had a GoDaddy certificate for newmail.foo.com. Yeah!

Now that was working it's time to setup the Autodiscover service. I set a SRV record for autodiscover to point to newmail.foo.com, but the users were getting a pop-up asking for permission to connect to it. I am an anti-popup person. So I setup autodiscover.foo.com in DNS to point to the OWA webserver. Did it work?

No.

Why?

Another SSL problem with the certificate names. "autodiscover.foo.com" != "newmail.foo.com"

ARGH!

The Microsoft solution is to use a certificate with multiple "Subject Alternative Names", also known as a Unified Communications Certificate. They cost about $300. Personally I don't like spending that for a certificate. That's why we got a WILDCARD certificate you asshats!

After a healthy dose of expletives, I set out to move the autodiscover "application" to a separate website using our existing wildcard certificate.

Here is the part where that "doing it the hard way" feeling comes in. I couldn't find any commands or options to setup the /Autodiscover application under the new website.

After about 10 minutes of trying to figure out how to copy the settings over, I ...

1. Set another IP for the new site.
   
2. Popped a hole in Mr. Firewall for http and https.
   
3. Opened IIS.
   
4. Created the new site.
   
5. Edited the bindings to use the right ssl certificate.
   
6. Stopped IIS.
   
7. Opened c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationhost.cfg in notepad.
   
8. Copied <sites><Application Path> information from the default site to the autodiscover site. See update note below.
   
9. Copied the <locations> information from the default site to the autodiscover site.
   
10. Whispered a prayer of penance to the IT gods.
    
11. Started IIS.
    

Update 2009-03-17: I WAS doing it the hard way! There is a powershell command to create a new autodiscover virtual directory. It is new-autodiscovervirtualdirectory.

And wow, It worked! Was I ever surprised?!

Ttfn,
-ellie

Exchange SCR and ESE function Error

I'm running into some errors setting up SCR between our sites. I'll edit this post with the solution when I get it sorted out.

[PS] C:\Exchange>update-StorageGroupCopy -Identity Orl-exg1\Sg1 -standbymachine
lor-exg1
WARNING: Replication for storage group 'ORL-EXG1\SG1' is still suspended. If
needed, you can use the Resume-StorageGroupCopy cmdlet in the Exchange
Management Shell to resume replication.
Update-StorageGroupCopy : Seeding failed : Database seeding error: Error return
ed from an ESE function call (0xc7ff1004), error code (0x0).
At line:1 char:24
+ update-StorageGroupCopy  <<<< -Identity Orl-exg1\Sg1 -standbymachine lor-exg1

It looks like it is something with the Windows firewall. Turning it off makes it work. Feature. Now to figure out what application needs to be permitted through the fw.

PPTP Vpn through a Linux IpTables/Netfilter firewall

I spent some time configuring a pptp vpn for one of our offices yesterday, but it kept failing to connect during testing. Each failure generated these errors in the firewall (the one I was Vpn-ing too) log.

pptpd[9078]: GRE: Bad checksum from pppd.
pptpd[9078]: CTRL: Received PPTP Control Message (type: 15)
pptpd[9078]: CTRL: Got a SET LINK INFO packet with standard ACCMs
pptpd[9078]: GRE: read(fd=7,buffer=80505a0,len=8260)
 from network failed: status = -1 error = Protocol not available
pptpd[9078]: CTRL: GRE read or PTY write failed (gre,pty)=(7,6)

As my comp.sci instructor would say, "Bad Times".

The vpn connection worked from a direct-internet-connected host, so logically the VPN setup was probably right. Here in the office I am behind a Linux IpTables firewall, and I deduced that it was probably the issue. Nothing was set to block the GRE protocol though, so I was a little puzzled.

I found this TLDP post (Do not bother reading it...) on how to make pptp work through iptables. Ah-ha! It was the firewall. Then I realized that documentation was ancient. By Ancient I mean it refers to the 2.0 and "new" 2.2 kernel. The current Linux kernel is > 2.6! eep! It was probably translated from some obscure dead language it is so old.

Anyway, the solution is much simpler... Iptables has a module that allows pptp to pass through NAT. My tale of woe happily resolved with this command.

modprobe ip_nat_pptp

One more useful tidbit. You can see a list of available IpTables modules with this command..

locate netfilter | grep .ko

Good Luck,
-Ellie