For those of you who might be interested, an article I wrote has just been published on Microsoft NextHop. It goes through the steps of using Netmon to capture and decrypt Lync traffic for advanced troubleshooting.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2012/02/15/how-to-decrypt-lync-2010-tls-traffic-using-microsoft-network-monitor.aspx

NextHop is a great resource, definitely worth subscribing to.

As always, great to here your feedback

Tom

Info shamelessly copied from Justin’s blog , it would be great to see you there:

“

UC Expo is on again this year on the 6th and 7th of March at Olympia in London. It’s the premier UC event in the UK/EMEA for vendors and end-user customers to come together and see the latest developments in the industry along with lots of informative seminars. I’ve attended the last 2 years (including manning our Modality stand last year) and enjoy meeting new people, catching up with old ones and learning about the new and exciting tech coming out.

This year however, Tom, Adam and Justin have teamed up with UC Expo to present our own little MUCUGL seminar on Lync Mobility. We’ll be talking about the new client and how it can fit in with your existing or new Lync deployment, as well as getting in front of a few new faces and talking about how awesome our user group is.

When: 6th March, 3:50 PM – 4:20 PM

Where: Mobility Track

For more info and to add our seminar to your MYVISIT planner, check out the seminar page on the UC Expo site here.

“

You can find the show here where you can download or stream the mp3.

We talked a little about Lync in general, then specifically about how business are actually leveraging Lync, both what comes out of the box and beyond with business applications that integrate and leverage Lync’s abilities.

If you are interested in Lync and CEBP I hope you find it a worthwhile listen.

I also really encourage you to subscribe to the RunAs Radio Podcast It’s a great weekly interview series on lots of different areas of technology and it’s certainly a regular treat for me on my travels.

As always, keen to hear your feedback

Tom

SuperToast is a free desktop app that provides a persistent notification of a waiting message in the centre of your screen so you never miss a waiting IM blinking on your taskbar.

Here is a quick video of SuperToast for Lync in action (full screen the video to HD for best view)

SuperToast is completely free, register and download here . We’ve had over 500 downloads so far, some of them running on hundreds of desktops.

For a small charge we’re making custom versions with your company logo and can make any other customisations that your business requires.

Thanks to  Ståle Hansen ,  Matt Landis and danovich for their mentions of the app, and thanks to everyone for the RT’s Twitter too, this promotion helps us keep the app free.

Always good to hear your suggestions, feedback and comments. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog for more updates on our apps and other 3rd party apps in the coming weeks.

Tom

“Command execution failed: Cannot connect to dc01.lyncdup.int. Verify that you can connect to the server, have the appropriate permissions, and that you logged on with the correct credentials.”

Error: The RPC server is unavailable. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BA)

OK, so we’re looking at an RPC issue. I had just spun up the DC/CA but went and double checked the settings, all looked fine. Checked the Services were running correctly on both servers and relevant firewall ports were open (in fact disabled the windows firewall), all looked OK, same error.

From the problem Lync server I tried using PowerShell to pull some remote WMI info, it failed.

Interestingly, when I was logged onto the same server with a local server account (not domain account). The WMI calls worked, but logged on as the domain account they failed. This took me down a track of checking all the permissions with dcomcnfg.exe, again all looked ok there.

A bit more testing and I realised Get-WmiObject worked on some machines but not others. What was the common theme? My lab servers are split between two sites, which are connected by a site to site VPN between ISA 2006 and TMG. In each site I have a different default windows image that I sysprep, so either its something to do with that base image or it’s something to do with the VPN site link. I’ve not had any issues before with the base windows images (all 2008 R2) so I did a bit of googling around ISA and RPC.

I came across this link: http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/Creating-VPN-ISA-2006-Firewall-Branch-Office-Connection-Wizard-Part7.html Which talks about the impact of “Strict RPC compliance” on ISA Firewall. Sure enough it was ticked on this site-site link.

Once I disabled it on both ends of the site-to-site VPN link my RPC calls all worked fine and the cert wizard behaved as expected:

Interesting how the firewall policy affected calls over the VPN link when logged in as a domain account but not when logged into a local machine account, but either way disabling the strict RPC compliance solved my problem.

If you are hitting the same issue but you are not working on servers that are across a VPN/firewalled, you probably have some other RPC related error, try working through testing RPC with PowerShell (using Get-Wmiobject including the –credential option to test different credentials). Of course with the cert request you can simply do the request “offline”, copy the request manually, but it’s nice to know/fix the actual RPC issue.

Fixes this issue:

2670467  Large increases in load on the OrgID service because of recurring authentication requests from Lync 2010

“You notice that the ADFS server is experiencing larger than expected loads. These loads are more than 40 percent greater than expected. When you examine the traffic, most of the load is from recurring authentication requests from Microsoft Lync 2010. Lync 2010 is continually requesting OrgID tokens. This may be because of failed requests to Exchange Web Services (EWS). Each EWS request that Lync 2010 retries to send requires a new OrgID token, and the OrgID requests are causing the increase in authentication traffic to the ADFS server.”

Information here: KB2670498

Download the Lync.msp x86 package now.

Download the Lync.msp x64 package now.

It doesn’t fix the known CU4 client issue of the broken link to web help from the client (F1)

For Q2, ended December 31, Microsoft revenue was $20.89 billion, up 5 percent year over year. Operating income: $7.99 billion, a 2 percent decrease. Net income was $6.62 billion.

Specifically regards Lync and Skype, from the Earnings call:

“We continued to see strong growth in our productivity solution offerings. Lync, SharePoint and Exchange each grew double digits. We’ve previously shared with you the opportunity that we see for unified communications, and we are beginning to realize that potential. Lync revenue grew over 30% as customers such as Volkswagen and LA Fitness chose Microsoft to be their voice and video solution.”

“During the quarter, we started the integration of Skype’s world-class communication products and global-networked platform into our portfolio of products and services. While it is still early, we are excited by the momentum we have seen thus far, and by the opportunities to redefine social and real-time communications for consumers and businesses around the world.”

They also said they now have 100,000 businesses on Office 365.

Details here: http://www.microsoft.com//investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY12/Q2/default.aspx

There is good coverage of a lot of common products, and you can even upload your own files to add and other PowerShell modules you use.

Great for a little reference in your pocket/on the move.

For Lync the libraries you want are:

Microsoft.Rtc.Management.dll

Microsoft.Rtc.Rgs.Management.dll (Response Groups help)

RTC being Real Time Communications

Communicator Client KB2647093

OCS Group Chat Client KB2647090

OCS 2007 R2 Server KB968802

Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 Core KB2647091

Example using the Test-CsMcxPushNotification cmdlet

Error text:
Test-CsMcxPushNotification : The operation failed because of a server policy. The warning property may contain more information for the failure.
At line:1 char:27
+ Test-CsMcxPushNotification <<<<  -AccessEdgeFqdn edge.lab.com
    + CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (:) [Test-CsMcxPushNotification], ServerPolicyException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : WorkflowNotCompleted,Microsoft.Rtc.Management.SyntheticTransactions.TestMcxPushNotificationCmdlet

You will see this error in Lync logging

This is when the IM URL filtering policy is on and blocking http/https

The same issue affects to OCS 2007 R2 Edge Servers

The workaround for now is to remove http and https from the filtering. this can be done in the Lync Control Panel or with the following PowerShell commands:

• Set-CsImFilterConfiguration -Identity XXXX -Prefixes @{remove="http:"}
• Set-CsImFilterConfiguration -Identity XXXX -Prefixes @{remove="https:"}

In the above commands if your IM filters are set at the global level use –identity global

Obviously this limits the filtering heavily, as it will allow the most likely way users will paste URL’s to be sent i.e. “www.microsoft.com” will fail but “http://microsoft.com” will now be allowed.This issue will be fixed with a future patch.