How to Find the Lync/SfB Federation SIP Address of a Domain

Being the Lync / SfB Administrator of your company, you may at times need to look up the Federation SIP Address of another domain. It may happen that a federated partner domain decided to change their SIP Address or perhaps they've migrated their Lync On-Premise infrastructure to O365/Skype Online, and you need to update your own Lync organization with that new SIP Address.
Federation utilizes the SRV DNS record with a specific format, and for this, you can use the good old nslookup utility.

In this example, we are looking for the Federation SIP Address for microsoft.com. The result is sipfed,microsoft.com

C:\>nslookup
> set q=srv
> _sipfederationtls._tcp.microsoft.com
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
Non-authoritative answer:
_sipfederationtls._tcp.microsoft.com    SRV service location:
          priority       = 0
          weight         = 0
          port           = 5061
          svr hostname   = sipfed.microsoft.com
>

Looking at the example, the federation sip address always starts with _sipfederationtls._tcp. and followed by the actual domain.

eg.
_sipfederationtls._tcp.amazon.com
_sipfederationtls._tcp.contoso.com

References:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj618369(v=ocs.15).aspx
http://windowsitpro.com/skype-business/understanding-main-types-federation-skype-and-lync-environments
https://www.petri.com/setup-lync-federation

Share:

Read More

Lync Server: Windows Fabric Logs, Disk Space Usage and Circular Logging

If you're not interested in reading the entire post, you can skip to the solution.

I know there have been many articles written and available for this topic. The reason I decided to still write this is to provide more explanation to possible questions that I found myself asking too when I first encountered this situation.

To understand what Windows Fabric is, what is does and how it works you may refer to this link -
"Understanding how Windows Fabric Works (with regards to Lync)"

There are two (2) User Defined Collector sets by default when a Lync Front-End server is deployed.

• FabricLeaseLayerTraces
• FabricTraces

You can find these in Performance Monitor

And the default location of the files generated by these data collectors is in C:\ProgramData\Windows Fabric\Fabric\log\Traces folder of each Front-End server.

The screenshot above is from one of the FE Servers in my lab setup. As you can see there are multiple files with approximately 128MB size each. What happens is that once the log file reached a new log file is generated with an incremental version.

eg.

fabric_traces_130374156934210426_007625.etl
fabric_traces_130374156934210426_007626.etl

And there is no limit as to how many of these files are created and can ultimately use up all available free space.

So the questions:

Why the 128MB Maximum file size?

It can be any size really, it's just that 128MB is the default when the data collector was created. You can simply check this using the logman utility.

What triggers the data collector to start?

A Task is scheduled to run at system startup which calls the "StartTracing.cmd" batch file.

Where can I find StartTracing.cmd and how is Task Scheduler able to call it when there is no relative path indicated in the Task?

A relative path (eg. C:\Windows\etc\whatever.exe) is not necessary because the file StartTracing.cmd is located in a path that is already defined in the Environment Variables.

Think of notepad for example which you can run by just typing notepad.exe without having to specify the path - that is the same concept.

How do I stop Windows Fabric from generating multiple log trace files?

The short answer is to turn on Circular Logging.

How? According to this article - http://flinchbot.com/2014/02/28/the-hidden-logs-that-could-crash-your-lync-servers/ - you can turn on circular logging by running this command (from an elevated command prompt)

Logman update trace FabricLeaseLayerTraces -f bincirc --cnf

I did use that article as a guide to enable the Circular Logging for both collectors, but somehow logman still kept on generating new files. I'm not saying that it is wrong, only that some parameters were not included to achieve my intended outcome.

So why didn't it work? That is because despite circular logging being turned on, the versioning is still enabled and the overwrite switch was not specified. In order to really turn on Circular Logging and keep the number of files to 1, this is what I did:

Solution

• Run these commands in an elevated command prompt:

Logman update trace FabricLeaseLayerTraces -f bincirc --v --cnf -ow
Logman update trace FabricTraces -f bincirc --v --cnf -ow

What do the switches mean?

-f bincrc = turn on circular logging
--v = turn off file versioning
--cnf = turn off creation of new files
-ow = turn on overwrite of existing log file

• Temporarily stop the logging

logman stop fabricleaselayertraces
logman stop fabrictraces

• (Optional) Delete the existing log files 

del "C:\ProgramData\Windows Fabric\Fabric\log\Traces\*.*"

• Start logging

logman start fabricleaselayertraces
logman start fabrictraces

The Result?

Notice that the versioning has been removed.

The same log files will be overwritten every time.

Also, you may want to consider increasing the maximum file size to a much higher value (like 2GB or higher) since there will only one log file for each data collector.

logman update fabrictraces -max 2048
logman update fabricleaselayertraces -max 2048

References:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490956.aspx
http://masteringlync.com/2013/10/29/understanding-how-windows-fabric-works/
http://flinchbot.com/2014/02/28/the-hidden-logs-that-could-crash-your-lync-servers/
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/29408.out-of-disk-space-in-lync-server-2013.aspx

Share:

Read More

"MD5? What the hell is that?!"

My friend Charlie and I talked about MD5 the other day. He called me saying that he downloaded this program, a small utility for whatever it is that he was working on. He was able to finish the download and all but each time he tried to run the file he gets a message saying that the program is not valid or corrupted. So I asked him to download a new copy but the same thing happened. So I asked if he already checked the MD5 hash to see if the file is intact after download and all he could say was "MD5? what the hell is that?!". So I gave him a quick lesson on MD5 and in the end, he was only interested in how he could get the file correctly running.. just wasted my time explaining when I could have just accessed his computer remotely and checked on it myself.


For the benefit of those "would-be-future-Charlie", MD5 sum or hash or checksum is; when we look at it using a simple analogy is like the file's fingerprint. Yes, you know how every person's fingerprints are unique? You basically get the idea now right?
The MD5 hash values are provided by the publisher of the file along with the file itself when it was made available for download. The purpose of this is for the recipient (person downloading the file) to be able to validate that the file is not altered in any way and is still intact. there are instances wherein right after downloading the file it gets infected, or the download did not correctly finish, thus Charlie's problem.


Now the question is how do we check if the MD5 sums are correct?


I use two different tools for this.
md5sums (command line tool) http://tinyurl.com/md5sums
winMD5sum (GUI tool) http://tinyurl.com/winMD5sum


You can watch this video on how to use these two files to validate MD5 values.




Here's one using Linux/Ubuntu

Share:

Read More

Excel 2007 to DBF Conversion

Beginning MS Excel 2007, Microsoft dropped it's support for saving Excel files to DBF format among other file types available prior to this version. I don't suppose all users need to utilize this feature all the time but those who do have their reasons. They might be working with the census department, or just having fun converting spreadsheets to DBF and opening them with their favorite DB Editor like Access or FoxPro etc..

But there are still ways to convert your spreadsheet to the beloved DBF format should you really need to and I'll show you ways that I know how.

Import / Export Procedure

For this example, I created a spreadsheet file filled with random numbers named Random.xlsxThis is obviously a spreadsheet but for this procedure, we will open it with MS Access. Yes, MS Access will be used to import and ultimately export to DBF.

Using OpenOffice

Let's take the same file but this time we will use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is capable of reading MS Office files with great accuracy. And the good part is, it can save your file directly to dBase format.

Now there are commercial programs that can perform the same job but I don't like to use those when I have an alternative and I don't have to pay just for this purpose. That's about it.

I don't know if this will help many people, but hey, I have to post something right?

:D

Update:
I found this post which shows how to use VBScript to convert from Excel to DBF.
http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2007/12/write-dbf-file-from-excel-2007-with.html

Share:

Read More