Critical Error when entering Office 365 Exchange

UPDATE: This issue has since been resolved.

We got a ticket today about a user getting a critical error when trying to enter Office 365 Exchange. I recall a similar issue happening to me a week prior, so I took a look. Sure enough, when entering exchange, I get this error:

Here is the full report:

Client Information
——————

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36

CPU Class: undefined
Platform: Win32
System Language: undefined
User Language: en-US
CookieEnabled: true

—————–
Exception Details
—————–

Date: Thu Feb 08 2018 09:31:21 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)
Message: Script error.
Url:
Line: 0

Call Stack
———-

Error

    at Function.ErrorHandling.$Ee (https://r1.res.office365.com/ecp/15.20.464.16/scripts/common.js:1:189941)

    at ErrorHandling.showUnhandledException (https://r1.res.office365.com/ecp/15.20.464.16/scripts/common.js:1:189026)

Dump Event
———-

                isTrusted = true
                message = Script error.
                filename =
                lineno = 0
                colno = 0
                error = null
                NONE = 0
                CAPTURING_PHASE = 1
                AT_TARGET = 2
                BUBBLING_PHASE = 3
                type = error
                target = [object Window]
                currentTarget = [object Window]
                eventPhase = 2
                bubbles = false
                cancelable = true
                defaultPrevented = false
                composed = false
                timeStamp = 7115.5000000144355
                srcElement = [object Window]
                returnValue = true
                cancelBubble = false
                path = [object Window]
                composedPath = function composedPath() { [native code] }
                stopPropagation = function stopPropagation() { [native code] }
                stopImmediatePropagation = function stopImmediatePropagation() { [native code] }
                preventDefault = function preventDefault() { [native code] }
                initEvent = function initEvent() { [native code] }

Detailed Call Stack
———–

This error message occurs across two of three admin accounts on three computers. Oddly, the third account does not suffer this error. It also occurs across at least three browsers – Edge, Internet Explorer 11, and Chrome (Ver 64, both normal and incognito).

As of now, I know of no fix, and several cursory google searches where fruitless. This only started to occur within the past month (as I go into exchange on a monthly basis) and sadly there are no recent posts anywhere about this. If anyone has a clue on how to fix this, or if we simply have to wait until Microsoft does something on their end, let me know. Otherwise we just have to deal with this very minor nuisance.

SMTP Stopped Sending Mail to Office 365

Had a client whose SMTP server suddenly stopped sending scan to e-mails to their domain cloud Office 365 e-mail from their on-premise SMTP server. The queue folder quickly filled up with over a hundred e-mails, so what could have caused this problem?

After three days of troubleshooting, I finally figured it out. In the event log, I was seeing the following issue:

A total of three IP addresses were rejecting the mail, which never even left the queue folder to generate a log in the badmail folder. The three IP addresses were ‘207.46.163.42’, ‘207.46.163.74’, and ‘216.32.180.10’. A cursory search on Google revealed these to be Microsoft servers.

Now this worked perfectly just a few days ago, with no error message like it in the event logs prior to the 23rd of January, 2018. Could it really be this simple of a fix? I tried resetting IIS 6.0, started and stopped the SMTP service many time. I added smtp.office365.com as a smart host, I added a relay as detailed in several websites (including Microsoft’s), and I event played with different settings. Nothing worked… but I did notice occasionally a few e-mails would kick off at a time before failing again as I made changes. Now, I can’t say I know a lot about TLS, but it is my understanding that TLS required authentication and had to go across port 587.

Apparently not. I went back into IIS 6.0 Manager and right clicking on SMTP Virtual server and went to properties. Under the delivery tab, I clicked Outbound Security… at the bottom. There I clicked TLS encryption. I made zero other changes.

I clicked OK and then clicked apply. I didn’t even have to restart the SMTP service – all the e-mail in the queue folder cleared out within moments. Finally, a victory. As a final test, I sent test scans to our domain e-mail account from the Xerox SMTP configuration as well as sending another IT technician to send scans at the printers to themselves. It all worked like it should.

I’m not entirely sure why this works, but I would love if someone could fill me in. Remember, it worked days ago, then suddenly it stopped working until I enabled TLS encryption. I did not configure any ports other than 25.

KB4056894 May Break Hyper-V VMs

UPDATE: This issue has since been resolved.

KB4056894 has the potential to break Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts. The server itself comes up just fine, however the VMs get stuck in restoring mode at 0%. This poses a huge problem. So far this has only happened to one of our host servers with the rest coming up normally (Server 2012, Server 2012 R2, and one other Server 2008 R2 host). So how do you fix this issue? So long as the host comes up, simply uninstall the offending patch and restart. When we did this, the VMs immediately booted back up.

It is interesting to note that at one point Microsoft pulled these patches, but has obviously made them available again. Thankfully, the only issue we have had affected only this one server (so far) out of several hosts and over a hundred VMs. Of course, now Intel recommends that you skip those patches completely.

Random Black Screens with nVidia Graphics Card and Windows 7

For several months, I had dealt with an increasingly frustrating issue with my monitor’s screen suddenly going to sleep. Nothing I could do, aside from unplug it from the desktop and plug it back in, could get it to wake up. It certainly wasn’t a monitor issue (though I had those too), as swapping the monitor resulted in the same behavior. It wasn’t a cable issue, nor was it an issue with Windows power settings. I had narrowed it down to single point of failure – driver issues. My NVIDIA driver kept crashing and its frequency was increasing. It went from only happening in games to happening in Office and general browsing.

I had taken some steps to fix this – reverting to old drivers, installing new drivers from a completely clean slate. Nothing worked. Then I found this thread on the EVGA forums. The thread included details that matches my symptoms, down to the event log. According to that thread, it was an issue between the driver series and Windows 7. Even reverting to old drivers didn’t work as I simply hadn’t gone back long enough, as this issue has plagued the driver series for months.

So, I did what any sane person would do – I upgraded to Windows 10.

It has been two weeks now and not a single crash or blip in the event logs about a driver crash.

Now if you are having a similar issue, what do you do? Upgrading to Windows 10 for free ends December 31st, so after that you will need to pay a hefty sum for a license. I wish I can say I have a fix for users still on Windows 7 (aside from going back long enough on the driver history to avoid the bad drivers), but perhaps the thread above will.

Firewall unable to turn on (Windows Error code 0x80070422)

An odd issue, Windows Firewall was automatically off. This impacted a user who had numerous issues with their computer. The issue wasn’t hard to fix, but was certainly not easy to find a fix for.

A co-worker approached me asking for help to troubleshoot the firewall issue. We employ GPO for the firewall, but to my knowledge we do not disable the firewall.

After looking, it was obvious that this was no GPO that disabled the firewall. However, when we went to enable it we got an error code that the firewall could not be re-enabled, with error code 0x80070422.

 

After some digging, we discovered that the firewall was disabled automatically via Services. We simply had to choose “Automatic” for startup, then start the firewall through Services.

 

Once that was done, we checked back on the firewall. Sure enough, the Firewall was re-enabled. We restarted the computer to ensure that the firewall would automatically start, which it did.

Keep in mind, you must be an administrator to make changes to services.

File Explorer Crashes When Searching

One day I was servicing a client when they mentioned that searching for files on the file share drive was causing File Explorer to crash. I’ve never heard of that so I asked for them to show me. Sure enough, after digging deep enough into their file structure, they start a search and File Explorer would crash. This was occurring after a Windows 10 upgrade, so I wondered if maybe Windows 10 was suffering from corruption of some kind.

After some work we were still no closer to the solution.

Finally, I researched the issue for some time and found a solution.

Browse to the drive folder, then click on the View Tab. Click Options, then click the View Tab again inside the window. Under files and Folders, check the box that says “Always show icons, never thumbnails” and click apply. After that, the crashes stopped.

Mac Freezes when Connected to Wi-Fi

One peculiar issue I have run into in the past was when a Mac would freeze when a user would try to join it to their company’s internal Wi-Fi network. After trying different things for some time, I decided to do a little research.

I discovered that there were cases that Mac’s would freeze when connected to certain networks via Wi-Fi. What could be causing such an odd behavior? The answer is IPv6. Mac’s don’t always play nice with IPv6. Thankfully there is an easy fix, though it does need the use of the Terminal (Located under Utilities, which is in of itself located under Applications in the Finder).

Inside the terminal, simply run this command to disable IPv6 (Note: Only applies to OSX 10.7.x and up):

Networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi

To re-enable IPv6, run this command:

Networksetup -setv6automatic Wi-Fi

Still experiencing freezing issues on your Mac when connecting to a network, or have any other tips? Leave a comment below!

Input signal out of range when trying to install windows 10

I had an interesting yet frustrating issue pop up after buying a refurbished dell desktop. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows 10 on the machine so I hooked it all up. The computer I bought only had integrated intel graphics so that is what I plugged my Dell 2412M (1920 x 1200) monitor into. The computer booted up and I could view the bios just fine, but when I booted to the USB drive to install windows, I ran into a problem.

The windows logo would show and then the dots would circle, then the screen would go black and I would get the error message: “Input Signal Out of Range”. Puzzled, I restarted the computer. I again could see the BIOS followed by the windows logo with the rotating dots. Yet again the monitor went dark and displays the same message as before. (Honesty check: the dell displays a different message than input signal out of range, but my second monitor had that message instead).

So I ran downstairs and grab a spare lower resolution monitor sitting in my garage. I brought it up and plugged it in and into the computer. Same message. Weird. So it isn’t the monitor – it’s the computer. Googling the issue brought me to others having this issue, even trying the steps outlined here: https://www.infopackets.com/news/9901/how-fix-windows-10-display-not-compatible-when-upgrading.

Yet the only real fix I could find was to get a graphics card and hope that solves the issue. This was an unacceptable solution as I had a 24-hour turnaround on this build and I wasn’t in the mood to shop at several stores to try to find a low-wattage low profile graphics card that wouldn’t be sold at rip off prices.

The fix ended up being pretty simple though – when I plugged in the second monitor I didn’t bother to restart the computer – I just did a straight swap. So this time I turned off the computer, swapped the screens, and turned the computer back on. Voila. Success.

This might not fix your problem, after all who else has multiple monitors just sitting around? But maybe there is someone out there who this helps.

ESET showing blank screen

Came across this issue the other day – ESET Endpoint Antivirus suddenly decided it didn’t want to work anymore. Opening it up would show a blank window and nothing else. Right clicking the green check mark in the upper right corner would bring up some options, but the didn’t respond when clicking them.

The fix? Well you can uninstall and then reinstall it, though that ended up resulting in needing to manually finish the uninstall. The other option, and a much easier and quicker option to boot, is to go into services and restart (or in this case, start) the ESET service(s). Once the services has restarted, then everything started working normally.