When I connect to our Windows VPN, my Outlook client loses it's connection

The title basically says it all, but I will elaborate.

I have my Outlook client setup to use the Outlook Anywhere feature. This works fine when not connected to our VPN. However, when I connect to the VPN the Outlook client loses its connection.

I setup our VPN using Windows Server 2003's RRAS which seems to work fine but it seems like this must be causing the issue.

My workstation is running Windows 7 Professional and I have the properties of my VPN connection set to NOT use the default gateway on the remote network (so I'm using my local gateway and am able to browse the internet without issue).

Does anybody have any idea what the problem could be? This is very frustrating.

Thanks in advance.

From serverfault ThingsToDo

• What DNS servers do the VPN clients get? I'm assuming that Outlook Anywhere is configured to use a public FQDN that can't be resolved whilw connected to the VPN. When the VPN client is connected can it resolve the FQDN of the Exchange server?

  ---

  EDIT 1

  Just so I have a better understanding, we're referring to the public FQDN of the Exchange server, right? If so then it's safe to assume that your internal and external DNS namespaces are different (.com and .local, or whatever), right?

  ---

  Edit 2

  Now that we've established what the problem is we have to determine what an appropriate solution is. There are a number of ways to tackle this and although I've never encountered your specific problem here are some notes and some suggestions:

  Notes:

  RRAS will provide DNS server settings to VPN clients via one of two methods: 1. If the RRAS server is configured to allocate ip addresses to the VPN clients from DHCP (internal DHCP server) then the DNS server settings configured in the DHCP server will be asigned to the VPN clients. 2. If the RRAS server is configured to allocate ip addresses to the VPN clients from a static pool on the RRAS server itself, then the RRAS server will assign whatever DNS server settings are configured in the TCP properties of the NIC on the server that is configured for incoming VPN connections.

  Suggestions:

  One way to allow VPN clients to resolve both internal and external DNS records would be to set up another internal DNS server as a forwarding only server (this could probably be the RRAS server itself). On this forwarding DNS server you can configure it to use publicly available DNS servers for external DNS resolution and configure it to use conditional forwarding to use your internal DNS servers for internal DNS resolution. Configure the RRAS server to use a static ip address pool for VPN clients that resides within your LAN subnet (to allow connectivity to internal resources) and set the NIC that is configured for RRAS to use this new DNS server for DNS.

  This affectively creates a scenario where the RRAS server assigns the DNS server(s) that it's RRAS-bound NIC is configured to use to the VPN clients. When the VPN client needs to resolve an external DNS record the new DNS server will forward the query to whatever public DNS server you've configured it to use. When the VPN client needs to resolve an internal DNS record the new DNS server will forward the query to your internal DNS server, based on the conditional forwarding you configure on the new DNS server.

  In review this seems a little complicated and may be "over engineering" the solution. You may want to see if anyone else chimes in with a simpler, more "elegant" solution.

  ThingsToDo : No, I'm not able to resolve the FQDN of the Exchange server. What do I need to change on either DNS or RRAS so that the VPN clients will be able to connect while connected to ths VPN? I believe this is also causing other DNS issues that I haven't been able to resolve.

  joeqwerty : See my edits. Also, Outlook Anywhere wasn't really intended for use via VPN, one of the reasons being the problem you're experiencing now.

  ThingsToDo : Edit 1: Yes, they are separate (.com and .local)

  ThingsToDo : I'm not sure that this fully solves my problem (or at least not the way I want it to be solved) but you've been way too helpful to not award you the checkmark. You've helped me out a few times in the past (perhaps under different names)...just wanted to say thanks for sharing your information so freely.

  joeqwerty : Glad to help...
  From joeqwerty

• Set the TCP/IP properties of the VPN adaptor on the RRAS server to include the DNS server that would resolve the mail server FQDN to a VPN address.

  For more discussion of RRAS and DNS see this thread.

  From imoatama

robocopy transfer file and not folder

I'm trying to use robocopy to tranfer a single file from one location to another but robocopy seems to think I'm always specifying a folder. Here is an example:

robocopy "c:\transfer_this.txt" "z:\transferred.txt"

But I get this error instead:

2009/08/11 15:21:57 ERROR 123 (0x0000007B) Accessing Source Directory c:\transfer_this.txt\

(note the '\' at the end of transfer_this.txt)

But if I treat it like an entire folder:

robocopy "c:\folder" "z:\folder"

It works but then I have to transfer everything in the folder.

How can I only transfer a single file with robocopy?

From serverfault $pageUsers[$entry.posts[0].author].name

• See Robocopy /?

  Usage : ROBOCOPY source destination [file [file]...] [options]

  robocopy c:\folder d:\folder transfer_this.txt

  From KPWINC

• Acording to the Wikipedia article on RoboCopy:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy#Folder_copier.2C_not_file_copier

  Folder copier, not file copier

  Robocopy syntax is markedly different from standard copy commands, as it accepts only folder names as its source and destination arguments. File names and wild-card characters (such as ".*") are not valid source or destination arguments. Files may be selected or excluded using the optional filespec filtering argument. Filespecs can only refer to the filenames relative to the folders already selected for copying. Fully-qualified path names are not supported. For example, in order to copy the file foo.txt from directory c:\bar to c:\baz, one could use the following syntax*

  robocopy c:\bar c:\baz foo.txt
  

  From Adrian De Leon

Messages stuck in sendmail queue beyond confTO_QUEUERETURN lifetime

CentOS 5.x | SendMail

Hi Guys,

Messages are stuck in my server's /var/spool/mqueue/ folder beyond the lifetime I have specified in confTO_QUEUERETURN (5d). Any idea why this could be? The file permissions appear fine; files in the mqueue folder show rights of:

-rw------- 1 root smmsp

This is causing an issue because the queues are slowly getting larger and larger.

Any thoughts?

-M

---

Additional information... I'm seeing the queue size consistently growing. maillog shows entries like:

grew WorkList for /var/spool/mqueue to 28000

Any thoughts?

---

Just thinking outloud -- could the queue runner not be completing it's job in time? Maybe I could check with time sendmail -q -v

Any thoughts?

From serverfault Mikey B

• Although I have very little experience with CentOS, I do seem to recall seeing some flavor of linux that didn't have sendmail configured with a queue runner by default. I would be curious to see if your old messages are removed after running 'sendmail -q'. If that's the case, then I think you just need to configure your queue runner to run periodically.

  From unixguy

PHP5, curl, PostgreSQL, SSL, and segmentation faults (ubuntu 10.04)

This ONLY happens over SSL..

When I load my PHP extensions like so:

extension=pgsql.so
extension=gd.so
extension=mcrypt.so
extension=memcache.so
extension=pdo.so
extension=pdo_pgsql.so
extension=pdo_sqlite.so
extension=curl.so

I see segmentation faults like child pid xxxxx exit signal Segmentation fault (11) It seems to be between postgres (pgsql) and curl. Commenting out curl and everything works fine- but, I need curl. I Googled a bit and this seemed to be an older issue that had been resolved, but it's happening to me now, with PHP5.3.2 and postgres 8.4 libraries from the standard Ubuntu packages.

Any thoughts? Some installed packages:

i   libssl0.9.8                     - SSL shared libraries
....   
i   postgresql                      - object-relational SQL database (supported
i   postgresql-8.4                  - object-relational SQL database, version 8.
i   postgresql-8.4-plr              - Procedural language interface between Post
i   postgresql-client               - front-end programs for PostgreSQL (support
i   postgresql-client-8.4           - front-end programs for PostgreSQL 8.4
i   postgresql-client-common        - manager for multiple PostgreSQL client ver
i   postgresql-common               - PostgreSQL database-cluster manager
i   postgresql-contrib              - additional facilities for PostgreSQL (supp
i   postgresql-contrib-8.4          - additional facilities for PostgreSQL
i   postgresql-doc                  - documentation for the PostgreSQL database
i   postgresql-doc-8.4              - documentation for the PostgreSQL database
i   postgresql-server-dev-8.4       - development files for PostgreSQL 8.4 serve

And then php5-curl.

From serverfault Wells Oliver

• This infuriated me to no end and wasted so much of my time and ended up being related to Ubuntu 10.04 / libssl / mod-curl. More info and a patch here.

  HORRIBLE!

  From Wells Oliver

Apache - php executing on http is ok, but with https is not

hello,

i have new dedicated linux web server.

my hosting provider give me a setup of apache server with php on it.

when i open url in browser called with ip, ie: http://xxx.yyy.zzz.vvv/test.php, i get executed php script, and it works fine. so, everything works fine in that case.

problem occur if i call https in a browser, like https://xxx.yyy.zzz.vvv/test.php

in that case, i get browsers option Save as, and all i can do is save php file on my pc.

so, it looks to me that there is some misconfiguration with apache.

providers support told me that this will work ok when i build certificate in apache server. but, i'm not sure in that.

can you tell me if providers support is right.

also, on server is installed plesk. plesk made a lots of problems in the past. could it be that plesk made that problem?

if you can help me to solve this. thank you in advance!

From serverfault

• Hi,

  your host lies, if there's no certificate you will get a bad certificate message not a source code download. My guess is that your https settings are too way strict avoiding script from being executed. I'm sending a copy of a proper configurated https .conf file:

  NameVirtualHost domain.tld:80 
  <VirtualHost your_server_ip:80>   
  ServerAdmin webmaster@domain.tld   
  DocumentRoot /path/to/site/root/  
  ServerName domain.tld  
  ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/path/to/site/root/"  
  </VirtualHost>  
  
  NameVirtualHost domain.tld:443  
  <VirtualHost your_server_ip:443>  
  SSLEngine on  
  SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL  
  SSLCertificateFile "/path/to/your/file.crt"  
  SSLCertificateKeyFile "/path/to/your/file.key"  
  
  <FilesMatch "\.(cgi|shtml|phtml|php)$">  
      SSLOptions +StdEnvVars  
  </FilesMatch>  
  BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \  
           nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \  
           downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0  
  
  CustomLog "logs/domain.tld-ssl-request_log" \  
            "%t %h %{SSL_PROTOCOL}x %{SSL_CIPHER}x \"%r\" %b"  
  
  DocumentRoot /path/to/domain/root  
  ServerName domain.tld  
  ServerAdmin webmaster@domain.tld  
  ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/path/to/domain/cgi-bin/"  
  </VirtualHost>  
  

  At your's httpd.conf you might want to include/check for this:

  <IfModule ssl_module>  
  SSLRandomSeed startup builtin  
  SSLRandomSeed connect builtin  
  Include /etc/httpd/conf/ssl/*.conf  
  </IfModule>
  

  In my case i have separated files for domains with ssl certificates, so i include them on the statement above.

  And finally make sure you have the OpenSSL pack installed on your server.

  That's it, you can generate self signed certificates to test it out.

  From Rodrigo

How can I set a disk quota for a group (vs a user)

How can I set the disk quota for a group (vs. a single user) on an NTFS volume?

I'm using Windows Server 2003 SP2.

From serverfault CodeSlave

• As I commented to my unfortunately incorrect answer to your previous question - "Quotas only exist for users. My bad."

  From mfinni

• I've never used it, but Windows 2003 R2 introduced something called File Server Resource Manager which apparently gives you more options when it comes to quotas. In the original implementation, NTFS' quota support applied to users and volumes, not (sub)folders/groups.

  Edit: just noticed you said SP2 and not R2. Not sure if you actually have R2, but I'll leave this here anyway.

  From Graeme Donaldson

Sendmail/Postfix Adding Linux User Account to From header line.

I just moved to a new server, we're using postfix now instead of sendmail. The issue is that mail sent from PHP using the mail command (which interfaces with /usr/sbin/sendmail/) shows up in the clients inbox, and the 'friendly' name shown is Apache. Which is obviously confusing to an end user, causing them to wonder why they are being emailed by a native american indian tribe.

Postfix (sendmail wrapper) is taking whatever you put in the -f parameter, and tacking on the Linux user who called the program. So the from line in the header winds up looking like this:

From: sales@whatever.com (Apache)

Causing the client to use whats in the parenthesis as the 'friendly name'.

I could manually set the from header in php, but i'd rather just stop postfix from doing that, because i'd have to edit php code in a hundreds of places.

From serverfault profitphp

• My understanding of your issue is that the "GCOS" field of the password entry for the apache user is being sent. Do you really need a "friendly name" as you call it? If not, have you thought of removing the GCOS name from the apache password entry? Then there should be no "friendly" name attached to these email notes.

  profitphp : Wow, that was the last place i thought the issue would be. I just edited my passwd file and cleared the "GCOS" field, works as expected now. thanks!
  From mdpc