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Tips for a Tidy Communications Cabinet

September 29, 2019 by Paulie Leave a Comment

A cluttered communications cabinet is unpleasant to look at, confusing and difficult to work with. I’ve had to tidy up a few recently and it is a strangely satisfying task. Here are a few tips and some photos that show my basic approach.

Use short cables between the patch panel and the network switches.
Place 48-Port switches between port patch panels.
Use Velcro ties to bind groups of cables together.

Before
After

As you can see, the layout before was really difficult to work with, mainly due to the patch cable lengths. It was setup as follows (from top to bottom):

2 x 24 Port Patch Panels
1 x Cable Management Bar
1 x 24 Port Patch Panel
2 x 48 Port Netgear Switches
1 x Cable Management Bar

Even with shorter cables this layout would have still been a mess because so much unnecessary routing would be required. By moving the switches to sit between the patch panels you can patch every port without needing to route the cables anywhere other than the switch directly below or above it. In this example the switches were also swapped out for 48-Port UniFi PoE Switches. The patch cables are 25cm.

Ubiquiti UniFi Switch - 48 Ports Managed (US-48-500W)

Ubiquiti Unifi switch 48 Managed gigabit switch with SFP+ (US-48)

VELCRO Brand One Wrap Thin Ties | Strong & Reusable | Perfect for Fastening Wires & Organizing Cords | Black, 8 x 1/2-Inch | 100 Count

Ubiquiti UniFi Switch - 48 Ports Managed (US-48-500W)

Ubiquiti Unifi switch 48 Managed gigabit switch with SFP+ (US-48)

$747.98

$366.00

$10.00

With PoE

Without PoE

Buy on Amazon

Ubiquiti UniFi Switch - 48 Ports Managed (US-48-500W)

$747.98

With PoE

Buy on Amazon

Ubiquiti Unifi switch 48 Managed gigabit switch with SFP+ (US-48)

$366.00

Without PoE

Buy on Amazon

VELCRO Brand One Wrap Thin Ties | Strong & Reusable | Perfect for Fastening Wires & Organizing Cords | Black, 8 x 1/2-Inch | 100 Count

$10.00

Buy on Amazon

The next example isn’t as visually pleasing, because:

The cabinet is too small. I couldn’t fit the required number of cable management bars.
The existing analogue phone system forces patching to particular ports.
I just didn’t have enough time.

Before
During
After

It’s still an improvement and easier to work with, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. Hopefully they will be switching over to a 3CX VoIP system soon so at that point it can be completely reorganised.

The final one didn’t have a before photo, but it turned out simple and nice:

Image of UniFi Switches in Communications cabinet patched with 25cm Yellow cables. — There are 7 UniFi Switches in total to cover every port in the building

So if possible, make sure you have:

Plenty of space.
Lots of different cable lengths.
Make effective use of cable management bars.

Let me know your ideas in the comments.

VPN connections do not work after Windows 10 May 2019 Update

June 13, 2019 by Paulie 46 Comments

I received the latest Windows 10 update today (May 2019 – Build 1903) and found that none of my existing VPN connections worked. When I try to connect to one of them, it just says “connecting” and eventually stops without producing an error.

I have not found a solution to this, but I have found a very easy workaround. This is by using a tool that has been in Windows Since at least Windows NT 4.0 Called rasphone.exe. I actually prefer the simple interface it provides.

How to get access to your existing VPN connecitons

Create a new shortcut on your desktop to:
C:\Windows\System32\rasphone.exe
Double click your new shortcut and you should get this interface:
Try your VPN connection.

This will give you access to the traditional dial-up tool which seems to work perfectly. It’s quite clear that something in the update is blocking access to the credentials window appearing and therefore the connection never completes.

It seems strange to workaround an issue with the very latest version of Windows 10 by using a tool that has been around for over 20 years!

Office 365: 550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired when emailing a mail enabled public folder

July 1, 2014 by Paulie Leave a Comment

A recent change in Exchange online seems to have caused a problem with mail enabled public folders receiving messages from people outside of the organisation. It has never been necessary with Office 365/Exchange Online to give create permissions to the anonymous or default users , you could instead set the mail flow settings of the public folder to allow anonymous access.

You may see the following bounce message when sending to a mail enabled public folder:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

Your message wasn’t delivered due to a permission or security issue. It may have been rejected by a moderator, the address may only accept email from certain senders, or another restriction may be preventing delivery. For more tips to resolve this issue see DSN code 5.7.1 in Exchange Online. If the problem continues contact your help desk.

5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required [Stage: CreateMessage]>’

Of course it is possible and easy to set permissions for the public folder from Outlook to solve this problem, but doing this does not seem to be working for everyone. Some people are reporting success with it, but others not.

Setting the public folder permissions with PowerShell fixes the problem, but I cannot understand why there is a difference.

Setting Offiec 365 Public Folder Permissions with Powershell

In order to fix this problem you have to grant create permissions to anonymous and the default user. The Powershell cmdlet to do this is Add-PublicFolderClientPermission.

After connecting to Office 365 Remote Powershell as described here, you can run the following commands:

Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\test public folder" -User Anonymous -AccessRights CreateItems
Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\test public folder" -User Default -AccessRights CreateItems

Once you have added the permission it’s probably best to give it a quick check with:

Get-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\test public folder"

Hope this helps.

Changing the format of date parameters on a SQL Server 2012 reporting services report that is Sharepoint Integrated

January 15, 2013 by Paulie 20 Comments

Hit a snag today trying to set the format on date parameters that drive SSRS 2012 reports – at first I thought it would be simple to fix but after searching around for solutions, didn’t come up with much.

The specific problem I was/am having is that when you use Date/Time parameters to drive a report built in SSRS 2012 the date formats always revert to US format after choosing a date from the calendar control – making your date selections incorrect, or sometimes invalid, depending on the dates you have chosen. I don’t know if this problem exists when using the native viewer, but certainly many people have reported it in SharePoint integrated mode.

Changing the Language property of the report, the regional settings of the client or the regional settings of the server all make no difference (though I suspect that they also have to be set correctly).

The only solution that I found is to hard code the UICulture value into RSViewerPage.aspx, which on my system was found in:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ReportServer

The modified code looks like this:

<%@ Page language="C#" Codebehind="RSViewerPage.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="Microsoft.ReportingServices.SharePoint.UI.RSViewerPage,Microsoft.ReportingServices.SharePoint.UI.ServerPages,Version=11.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" UICulture="en-GB" %>

Changing the UICulture worked for me, but introduced a problem of its own – I lost the formatting of the sidebar on report viewer, after a little digging I found out why. As you may not be using “en-GB” you can also use the method to adapt it to your region.

The reason that formatting vanished is because I set my UICulture to en-GB which according to this page:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287874(v=office.12).aspx” title=”http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287874(v=office.12).aspx

Has a locale ID of 2057, previously the page source all referred to 1033 which is “English (United States)”. Having changed the UICulture it is now looking for folder “2057, which does not exist. There is a Styles subfolder which contains styles for each locale, on my system the full path to this was:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ReportServer\styles

There are lots of entries in that folder for many different locales, but not one for 2057 (Presumably because it is the same as en-US for the most part).

I simply copied the contents of 1033 to a new folder called 2057 and the formatting came back.

Pretty simple to fix when you have dug through the system and found all the relevant files, but not easy to discover. I’m not really happy with this fix and would be very pleased to hear of any better, more official ways of fixing the problem. Surely there are lots of people in other regions not using the US date formats for their Sharepoint Integrated reports. I’m not fond of manually tweaking the report viewer code.

Knitted cover for my Amazon Kindle

January 2, 2011 by Paulie Leave a Comment

It was my birthday recently and I was lucky enough to receive an Amazon Kindle, if you haven’t seen or used one of these I’d highly recommend it, it is actually quite an amazing little thing.

I also got the Official Amazon Cover for the reader but I really did not get on with it. It is high quality and durable, but it makes the device so awkward to read that I always end up removing the Kindle anyway. It is also quite heavy and I generally leave the Kindle in my laptop bag and can do without the extra weight.

My girlfriend, who knits constantly made me a Kindle Cover which fits the reader perfectly and provides surprisingly good protection. She has made the pattern available freely on this post on her blog.