Exchange 2016, owa/auth.owa and error 500 on ECP.

I was receiving error 500 and website was landing on owa/auth.owa on my Exchange 2016 server.

Interesting thing was – that happened to all admins but me  – who installed the server.

I found this blog post:

https://blog.ollischer.com/exchange-2016-http-error-500-after-logging-into-ecpowa

I’ve done all the steps, I ran UpdateCas.ps1 – that didn’t help, so I ran multiple commands that Alexander proposed – unfortunately that didn’t help out as well, additionally now I was getting popup asking me for to log in instead of nice Exchange website.

So I thought at least I will get back to the settings I had – removed Windows authentication and enabled form based authentication on ECP and OWA virtual directories, so basically I went back to previous settings:

Get-owaVirtualDirectory "\owa (Default Web Site)" | Set-owaVirtualDirectory -FormsAuthentication $true -BasicAuthentication $true -WindowsAuthentication $false

Get-ecpVirtualDirectory "\owa (Default Web Site)" | Set-ecpVirtualDirectory -FormsAuthentication $true -BasicAuthentication $true -WindowsAuthentication $false

Done iisreset, and once again wanted to see my error, I refreshed the page on the test user I made aaaaaaannndd… it was all working well.

A mystery…

Get pending windows updates status on ZABBIX using custom LLD (Low Level Discovery) and PowerShell

Just recently I got some time, and was rethinking the solution of reading windows updates.

At the beginning I thought I will use PowerShell to get update list and later use dependent items to parse the script output, but this wouldn’t be so nice, as I would need to manually work on parsing the file on the zabbix side, create items etc. + so far zabbix does not offer (I work on 3.4, at the time being 4.0 available) LLD on dependent items.

Well, why not use current LLD to read them?

You can do it – I will show you how.

Low Level Discovery (LLD) for PostgreSQL on ZABBIX using ODBC.

How about ZABBIX PostgreSQL monitoring with LLD without custom addons installed on the server or milions of very heavy userparameter? 🙂

I’ve been searching for some way to monitor PostgreSQL database, all the solution I’ve found were based either on some custom addon:

https://share.zabbix.com/databases/db_postgresql/postgresql-monitoring-for-zabbix

http://cavaliercoder.com/libzbxpgsql/

Or had tooooonnns of userparameters that were just killing the server:

https://share.zabbix.com/databases/db_postgresql/template-postgresql

Well I though there is a better way, and you know what? I think there is.

Folder named “Files” disappears after mailbox is moved to O365 Exchange Online.

Lets say a user had (pleas note the past simple time ^^) a folder named “Files” in the mailbox on the top level, you have moved the mailbox to O365 Exchange Online…

Completely remove whole meetings’ SERIES using PowerShell and EWS.

Hey!

Some time ago I’ve published here a way to remove meetings from calendars using EWS:

https://paweljarosz.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/exchange-online-remove-cancelled-outlook-meetings-using-powershell-and-ews/

I got a bit upset that I needed to run the script from time to time to remove old stalled  cancelled meetings that were there before applying “AutoAccept” calendar processing. We got tons of them believe me, and I wanted to get rid of them completely! But how to remove the whole series and not just meetings for like two years, I wanted not to worry about the meetings even after 5 years, I just didn’t know how to remove the whole series as when people were mentioning about removing the series in the Internet articles, they were usually mentioning how to remove meetings for a long period of time and were calling it by removing a “series”.

How to remove litigation hold from mailbox in Exchange Online and clean Purges folder immediately.

When removing litigation hold from mailbox in Exchange Online you need to run these 2 commands in order to start mailbox clean immediately:

Set-Mailbox -Identity "identity" -LitigationHoldEnabled:$false
Set-Mailbox -Identity "identity" -RemoveDelayHoldApplied

Items cannot be deleted from mailbox’s “deleted items” even using MFCMAPI.

Hey,

Just recently I’ve got this weird issue.

Mailbox got stuck. I was able to remove emails from inbox folder and subfolders, even from the Recovery Items folder BUT… not from the deleted items folder.

The behaviour was weird – I was removing some emails and they were reappear after some time, same with MFCMAPI – was clicking hard delete and these bastards didn’t even move.

I was even not able to move the mailbox as it was telling me that mailbox exceeded the quota – I knew it – well, let me remove these emails then!!!

The reason for that appeared very trivial, I’ve been mentioning about this mechanism here: https://paweljarosz.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/singleitemrecovery-in-exchange-2013-recovering-emails-from-purges-folder-with-search-mailbox-cmdlet/

Mailbox had litigation hold enabled and the “Purges” folder on the mailbox got filled up to 100GB. I thouhgt that these emails will be moved to archive but somehow these were still in the mailbox space causign the issue.

Removing the litigation hold allowed to finally delete the emails from deleted items.

Just as a reminder to check what is the size of the “Purges” folder run:

Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -Identity “<mailbox_name>” -FolderScope RecoverableItems -IncludeAnalysis | ft