In monitoring we recently saw a Scheduled Task for a Shadow Copy Job failing with 0x2.

After running the Action manually in CMD I go the below error

C:\Windows\system32>C:\Windows\system32\vssadmin.exe Create Shadow /AutoRetry=15 /For=\\?\Volume{411116ac-84e511-11116-80d4-11111111111}\

vssadmin 1.1 – Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2013 Microsoft Corp.

Error: Either the specified volume was not found or it is not a local volume.

Running this in powershell listed all the Volumes with their current GID

GWMI -namespace root\cimv2 -class win32_volume | FL -property Label,DriveLetter,DeviceID,SystemVolume,Capacity,Freespace

Turns out the job was for a GUID that didn’t exist anymore on that system. After checking the other ShadowCopyVolume Tasks to make sure all the Disks were accounted for , I deleted the errored job

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Recently a user needed to Search another user’s 100GB Archive and Mailbox. Outlook search was taking far too long.

You can assign a user Permission to use the Content Search in  Security and Compliance Center  and limit access to a single Mailbox.

Assign Roles : 

In the Security and Compliance Center, Under Permissions,  Create a new Role with the following Roles assigned and add the User who needs to access

Assign Filter

This limits the users search scope to only a single Mailbox

Connect to 365 Security and Compliance Center :

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.compliance.protection.outlook.com/powershell-liveid -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber -DisableNameChecking

Add Filter

New-ComplianceSecurityFilter -FilterName MailboxFilter -Users pa@domain.com -Filters “Mailbox_DisplayName -like ‘John Smith'” -Action All

Wait around 10 minutes for this to apply then try logging in

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Recently when trying to login to a Citrix XenApp Server ( OS Server 2012 R2 ) users were getting a frozen Welcome Screen. The loading ‘Circle” would just stop and go no further.

Rebooting the cluster ( Datacollectors/Storefront and XenApp Servers ) did not resolve the issue. The session would start to load then go no further. I could login to the server via the console just not through the receiver.

Logging into the Data Collector I was greeted with 

“Trial Period Expired”

Checking the Licensing Tab showed no available licenses. I wasn’t able to check the original licenses so I created a temp account to setup a Trial License of 90 days

Create Trial Citrix Licenses

1. Navigate to www.citrix.com and select Sign In (located in the upper right hand corner).
2. Sign in using your My Account login credentials 
3. Hover over the Downloads Tab and select Free Trials 
4. Select the product you are trying to evaluate 
5. Proceed to follow the prompts to request the product of choice 

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Upon trying to access Legacy Public Folders using 365 Webmail ( OWA ) the following error message is displayed

No public folders are available. Check that a public folders deployment exists in this Exchange Organisation
If so , please try again later

Solution:

You will need to use Outlook as per below

“In addition, users whose mailboxes are in Exchange Online won’t be able to access on-premises public folders using Outlook Web App”

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dn986544(v=exchg.150).aspx

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Had a ticket regarding 3 different sent emails to 3 different third parties which were getting duplicated into an IT mailbox on Office 365.

I double checked the “rules” under Mail flow to make sure there were no BCC rules for the users sending which there were not.

In MailTrace the emails came up as Status “Expanded”. This means the email has been sent to a group, however the original email was sent to a Single External Email address?

Why was the external email being displayed as a group in 365?

Turns Out the Outbound Spam Preferences had been turned on! And for whatever reason, these items were triggering the BCC of suspicious messages! 

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If you navigate to your Calendar Tab in Outlook App

Click on this icon 

Then Add Shared Calendars

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Recently had a customer that was getting 15 – 20 minute delays in receiving emails from MailChimp. The same email to services such as Office 365 , Gmail and other email providers came through straight away.

We had whitelisted Mailchimps IP’s per below from Greylisting and Spam to no avail. The Message tracking proved that the message wasn’t hitting the Administration console for the 15 Minutes delay

Source IP Ranges (n.n.n.n/x): 
205.201.128.0/20
198.2.128.0/18
148.105.0.0/16

We lodged a Mimecast support ticket and got this escalated to Level 2 and waited a week for a response. In the end a retry of the issue with the technician came through straight away which means there must have been a block somewhere in Mimecast

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Recently after a reboot of a server, it came up as errored in our monitoring. I couldn’t ping it however when I logged into it, I could ping out ( Firewall! ). The network Profile for the Network card had changed from Domain to Private which automatically blocks ICMP and RDP.

The server might have started faster than the Domain Controller due to Windows Updates.

You can change the Profile Category of a Network Adapter per below 

Set-NetConnectionProfile -NetworkCategory DomainAuthenticated

However

Set-NetConnectionProfile : Unable to set NetworkCategory to 'DomainAuthenticated'. This NetworkCategory type will be set automatically when authenticated to a domain network.

Restarting the Network Location Awareness service fixed this and change this backt to Domain

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Recently we had jobs for a server showing up the error : NFC storage connection is unavailable

Turns out a colleague had added a server to the Veeam application with a tape drive to the unit which had actually added that server as a Veeam Backup Proxy!

Jobs actually default to “Use Any Available Proxy” so the Jobs were using the tape drive server as a proxy for some of the Jobs hence the NFC Failure

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Recently we swapped a users UPN on a local domain controller ( which syncs to 365 via AAdconnect) to another domain and SMTP alias, all worked well however she could not login to Skype for Business.

Resetting Windows Credentials, Caches and registry items still would not fix this.

Most of the time this is due to the SIP Address not being correct. Little did we know this user had Lync before migrating to 365 so they had a SIP address in the attribute editor

Changing this resolved the issue

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