IMA ADPCM CODEC 80000Khz 4Bit MONO Format for Phone Systems

Today I had a challenging task of setting up Auto Attendant on a Panasonic phone system. We required to record a Greeting message and upload it to the phone system. It seamed that simple.

After recording it and while trying to upload it to the Phone system, it rejected the recording stating that it was not in acceptable format. and we were greeted  with following popup.

Now what’s that?

I tried to find how can I get my WAV file accepted by the Phone system, tried many APPS but couldn't get  this done.

Finally, I came across AUDACITY.. can be downloaded from here https://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/ 

Its free and approx. 24MB in size.

Following are the steps to convert a WAV file to IMA ADPCM CODECS, 80000KHZ, 4BIT, MONO format.

Download and install Audacity from the above link.

BEFORE STARTING MAKE A COPY OF YOUR RECORDINGS… Just In Case (JIC)

1) Open Audacity

2) Click File and Select Open

3) Browse to your recorded file location and Click Open

4) Now your WAV file is loaded into Audacity and either now Press Ctrl+A or Click Edit >> Select >> ALL to select the WAV recording.

5) in the Bottom left Cornet change 44000 or 48000 to 8000 or matching your desired output in this case 8000.

6) Now click File >> Export Audio

7) In next window, First change the File name to avoid overwriting the original file.

6) In save as Type select “Other uncompressed file”

8) Click Options

9) In options Popup window, Select Header as “WAV” and Encoding as “IMA ADPCM”. Click OK

Now you have your new file (the name you specified in Step 7) ready to be used with your phone system.

Checking Exchange Mailstore Database Seed Status Percentage completion and Copy Speed

Today one of my DAG database started giving issues, I had to delete and create new DAG DB copy.

but I was not able to get what is the status of the Copied data, What is Speed of copying??

So here is the magical command which revealed all that information.

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus

Let us suppose you have a Exchange server named EX02

The database here which is seeding is named MailDB01

So we executed following command to reveal all the seeding process status details

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus “MailDB01\EX02” | FL

and in the Output screen you can see all the details

Further to calculate estimate time for completion you can use the following script

http://www.flobee.net/estimate-the-time-to-complete-seeding-a-mailbox-database-copy/ 

Thanks

Outlook SSL Security Alert Certificate Name is Invalid

Our Exchange Certificate expired and we had to renew the SSL. after deploying the new SSL, some users started getting SSL security Alert on their outlook’s

No all users but some, after seeing the screenshot we narrowed it down to that the SSL is ok but the Security alert is about One of the DAG Server Name not included into the SSL. so I knew that this has to do with Autodiscover URL.
I logged into Exchange Server and executed the following command
Get-ClientAccessService -Identity EX04SERVER | Select AutodiscoverServiceInternalUri
Output I received was as below

AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri
------------------------------
https://EX04SERVER.my.localADdomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml
This clarifies that the Autodiscover is accessing internal Server name URL therefore it had to be changed to Global URL
Executed following command
Set-ClientAccessService -Identity EX04SERVER -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri
https://mail.mymaildomain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml

and the issues is no longer reported by any users
Here in this scenario
My server name is : EX04SERVER
My external mail domin is : mail.mymaildomain.com
My SSL certificate name is : mail.mymaildomain.com
My Activedirectory Domain is: my.localADdomain.com

OWA ERROR Something Went Wrong, Your Account is disabled

Today one of our user faced an issue when he was trying to access his account from OWA. he was greeted with Error as shown in above screenshot.

His Outlook & Mobile devices were working fine.

so I had to do following to clear the Issue

from Exchange Management Shell EMS

Ran the Following command to check if OWA was Disabled for the user

Get-CASMailbox affecteduser | fl Name,OWAEnabled

and got back reply

OWAenabled: Disabled

SO I executed following command to enable it

Set-CASMailbox administrator -OWAEnabled:$true

The same can be done from ECP too

1) Log into ECP
2) Go to Recipients
3) Select the affected user and click Edit
4) Click on “Mailbox Features” Option
5) Under Mobile Devices Click to “Enable OWA for devices”.

Close our Browser and now relogin as affected user and OWA should be working fine now.

SharePoint 2016 Cross domain and Trusted domain users access & rights

Today, one of my client approached me and requested me to make provision in his SharePoint environment for providing access to the users which are in their trusted domains.

so, here is the scenario and the solution…

There is a Domain One.Domain.net and a second domain as Two.Domain.com, it has a two-way trust enabled amongst them.

SharePoint is in One.Domain.net and the name of server is SP2016

Central Admin site URL is : http://SP2016.one.domain.net:9515

The Intranet URL is : http://SP2016.one.domain.net

To enable People picker to browse to trusted domain, I ran the following commands in elevated SharePoint Shell.

STSADM.exe -o setapppassword -password Paswd@12$Sp

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests -pv "forest:One.Domain.net,One\ReadonlyAdminOne,ReadOnlyAdminOne_Password;forest:Two.Domain.com,two\ReadonlyAdminTwo,ReadOnlyAdminTwo_Password" -url http://SP2016.one.domain.net:9515

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests -pv "forest:One.Domain.net,One\ReadonlyAdminOne,ReadOnlyAdminOne_Password;forest:Two.Domain.com,two\ReadonlyAdminTwo,ReadOnlyAdminTwo_Password" -url http://SP2016.one.domain.net

After 5 min, the people picker was able to identify and add users from trusted domain Two.Domain.com

Lenovo Laptop Brightness Issue

Today I faced a very peculiar issue, we had a display driver update for our Lenovo Laptops Z500 and suddenly the brightness went to 0 no matter what we did, nor even the reboot resolved the issue.

finally this registry setting did the trick.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000]

"FeatureTestControl"=dword:0000f048

Changed the dword from f048 to ffff

or whatever the value just change it to ffff

rebooted the laptop and all was fine and functional again. lot of Lenovo laptops of even different models are facing this brightness issue.

just open regedit and find FeatureTestControl

take the backup of the registry settings before making these changes. always do a backup. one day you will thank for this advice.

maybe this helps someone somewhere.

Outlook keeps prompting for password Exchange 2013 / 2016

Like any Exchange admin I too came accross connectivity issues from Outlook client to Exchange

The issues which I faced with both Exchange 2013 & 2016, with Outlook 2013 & 2016, it kept on asking the users for password, no matter what I did, the issue could not be resolved.

Finally the following steps resolved this issue and all users are now happy.

lets us assume we have mail domain as mymaildomain, your External hostname &  Certificate name is mail.mydomain.com

open exchange management shell and run the following commands

first we set Outlook certificate name

Set-outlookprovider expr -certprincipalname: "msstd:mail.mymaildomain.com"
Set-outlookprovider exch -certprincipalname: "msstd:mail.mymaildomain.com"

then we set outlook authentication & the way outlook should treat the connection settings

Set-outlookanywhere -InternalHostname mail.mymaildomain.com -ExternalHostname mail.mymaildomain.com -identity "EXCSrv\Rpc (Default Web Site)" -InternalClientAuthenticationMethod ntlm -ExternalClientAuthenticationMethod ntlm -internalclientsrequiressl $true -Externalclientsrequiressl $true -IISAuthenticationMethods basic,ntlm,negotiate

Dont forget to change the mymaildomain name to reflect your mail domain.