Webs’ Random Ideas

and the damn Guest Wireless Controller finally works. Since Thursday at 9:00P I worked nearly a weeks worth of work hours trying to fix guest wireless at my company. After getting Cisco on the phone it was finally solved. I will try to write more later, because it’s an issue others could easily run into.

Cisco Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks… yea, I’m such a nub at this stuff I had to cheat and look up the title for the class there

But the good thing is when you don’t know much about topic “X” and your company sends you to training on topic “X” you tend to learn a TON about topic “X”. So I’m learning a lot and happy with how much I have remembered from class 3-4 years ago. The key though to anything networking is subnetting!!! Without that I would be completely screwed.

Problem:
Multiple users have reported their shared calendars disappearing. They will log off and back on the next day to find their shared calendars are gone. Sometimes they will restart or shutdown and the shared calendars will disappear. Sometimes they will log off, restart, or shutdown and the shared calendars do not disappear. The issue seems very sporadic.

Configuration:

• Exchange Server 2003
• Office 2007 and Windows XP on all clients
• Clients running in Cached Exchange Mode
  

What I have tried:

• Installing all MS XP and MS Office updates
• Searching the web
• I found the two links below and neither makes any sense. There is nothing in the XML file about shared calendars.
• Some Google Groups posting that mentions items from the nav pane being stored in an XML file
• Another article mentioning similar information and recommends running the resetnavpane switch

Possible Solution:
The information for the list of shared calendars a user is connected to appear to be stored in the Exchange account for that particular user. Which means this information is also stored in the OST file locally. So the most likely scenario is the OST file is somehow corrupt.

Well our users have a Roaming User Profile (RUP). Their local user account folder on the computer is replicated to a server, and the information is snyc’d. So our best guess is the RUP setup is screwing up some files. We will be removing this setup from one user’s account to see if it has an affect as we no longer have a need for RUPs.

UPDATES:

05/09/2008 -
Good news with the RUPs, our control group (the user with the RUP) just reported having her shared calendars disappear. Our test group (the user without the RUP) has yet to report the shared calendars disappearing on her. So we will now remove the RUP from our control user and see what happens. I will keep anyone reading this post up to date!

Scenario:
Only one user cannot connect to Exchange with Outlook. OWA (Outlook Web Access) works fine and no one else has reported the problem. Lower right corner of Outlook shows something like “Cannot connect to Exchange Server”. Reboot Outlook and now Outlook won’t even load up. It starts and you can see something that might be the inbox, but then Outlook closes and throws up an error. I have never seen this before…

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