Sudden mysterious spam increase with Exchange Online Protection

We've been using Exchange Online Protection and it's predecessor Forefront Online Protection for Exchange for about 5 years now. Somehow, suddenly, in the last couple of months we got a drastic increase in the amount of spam being delivered to users' mailboxes. I found, read, and even commented in this thread where other users were seemingly encountering the same issue.

Eventually I, with no support from MS, found the source of my issue though I'm not exactly sure how it came about.

We had always had our default content filter set to move spam and high confidence spam directly to the online quarantine. At some point this changed to what is now (and maybe always was) the default behavior of delivering the spam to the users' junk mail folder as described in this technet article. We did not have the necessary transport rules in place to actually cause the mail to go to junk email so it was just being delivered to the inbox.

I'm not clear if the default behavior changed, or if our rule had been modified and then subsequently reverted to default.

I can say that we signed up to demo Exchange Online so it's possible that reverted during the setup of our temporary "hybrid" demo situation. The timing seems about right but I can't say for certain this is the root cause of the issue.

High latency (ping) on every other packet

This morning I was troubleshooting some issues with out Aruba IAP105 access points (Dell branded). When attempting to ping either internal or external IPs I saw very strange behavior. Internally the first packet would have a latency of 1 or 2ms, the next over 900ms. This was perfectly regular and predictable, and external pings showed similar symptoms. Searching and searching and searching eventually yielded this link. Why yes, I was in fact running Metageek's inSSIDer tool in my troubleshooting attempts. Closing inSSIDer immediately fixed the high latency issue. I'm glad it only took me an hour of frantic searching to come up with this solution!

Install Filemaker Pro 7 on Windows 7

Filemaker Pro 7 came out in 2005, but one program in my agency was still using it for a particular database application. Upgrading would be expensive since all clients would need to be upgraded simultaneously as well as possible modifications needed on the database. Since we already own the software I went ahead and installed on a new client yesterday.

The first error is described in this forum post. After the installation was almost complete an error would pop up that openssl.exe had failed to run. Using the solution provided in this article seemed to work. I set the date back to 6/9/07 and didn't receive that particular error.

Frustratingly, though, the application would then fail to run with an error that read "This application has been installed incorrectly or modified by another program. Please run the installer to get a fresh copy of the application after determining the cause." None of the solutions provided by diligent googling seemed to apply (or work - I tried).

What did work was to start the installer in XP compatility mode. Instructions are shown here for using Windows XP compatibility mode. I didn't need to make any specific settings changes after install, and the OpenSSL error noted previously doesn't seem to have any actual affect on this process.

"The operation failed. Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting." Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007

We recently started having some frustrating issues with resource mailboxes on our Exchange server. The issue didn't seem to affect every user, and the exact error message depended on a number of different factors. The most common is the one listed in the title: "The operation failed. Cannot directly book a resource for this meeting.", but we also saw:

'You marked " resource name " as a resource. You cannot schedule a meeting with " resource name " because you do not have the appropriate permissions for that account. Either enter the name as a required or optional attendee or talk to your administrator about giving you permission to schedule " resource name " . '

We tried SO MANY suggestions on this issue before hitting on the magic method in this thread The following steps cleared up this error for all users in all configurations:

1. Make sure you have full access permissions on the calendar (done in EMC)
2. Create an Outlook profile from the Mail control panel for the resource account
3. Open Outlook with the resource profile
4. Go to Tools > Options > Calendar Options > Resource Scheduling
5. Uncheck all options!

It seems paradoxical that un-checking these options would work. Stranger still is that the calendars continue to automatically process requests, etc. after un-checking these options. Oh well, another mystery solved!

Install Dell Wireless 1506 without Unified Wireless Application

I just got a batch of Dell Latitude E7440's on my desk and found, much to my surprise and annoyance, that they came bundled with a wifi management application called Unified Wireless Application. Uninstalling this useless drek also unhelpfully uninstalled the driver for the wifi card! The situation is described in more detail here.

I was able to get the drivers from this package and get them installed by doing the following:

1. Download file Network_Driver_8G8D5_WN_10.0.0.286_A02.exe from Dell
2. Run this executable and choose Extract to dump contents to C:\temp\
3. After uninstalling the Useless Wireless Application I opened the Device Manager and found the device in question
4. Choose to Update Driver, then point the device manager at C:\temp\

This seems like the kind of hack that shouldn't be necessary on a brand new system, but there you have it - wifi without the annoyance.

Website Project - www.shitredditbuys.com

I'd like to take a moment to introduce my new web project: Shit Reddit Buys. This is the first iteration in a project I'm part of to automatically generate content for a website. You can also see a live feed on Reddit itself: /r/ShitRedditBuys. We're currently in the process of expanding our algorithms to focus specifically on music and books and will launch those in the near future. If you've ever wondered what users on Reddit are buying - wonder no more!

Reboot Cisco ASA 5505 from ASDM

For some reason I've searched for this multiple times and always end up with little in the way of results. As a way of reminding myself and hopefully helping the next poor soul searching for this here it is:

Tools menu -> System Reload...

Choose to schedule the reload for "Now" and click Schedule.