Vista / Outlook 2007 & Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTPS)

The next logical step is of course, after getting online, to get my exchange mailbox runing on my local PC (this Vista box is quite new and only turned up after I lost broadband). I thought this would've been nice and easy since I'd already messed about importing certs etc to get OWA to work properly. But I thought wrong.
After a fair bit of messing around, I needed to employ a couple of "tricks" to get operational.

If you're having problems as well, then try the following method...

First, start configuring Mail as normal (via the Control Panel icon) and put in your FQDN (local) server name and user name. Go into "More settings..." and on the connection tab, check the box for Outlook Anywhere. Click the Exchange Proxy Settings button and type in the public FQDN for your Exchange server (without the /exchange) in the "Use this URL..." box. Ensure the "Connect using SSL only" & "Only connect to proxy servers..." boxes are both ticked. In the "Only connect to..." box, type in "msstd:" (without the quotes or spaces) followed by the same FQDN as above.
Tick the "On slow networks " box.
Now, if your PC is not a domain member for any reason (mine isn't - hey I'm at home, remember), then choose Basic Authentication instead of NTLM.
Apply & OK your way out and see if the check-name lookup works (it should result in an underlined mailbox name after prompting for credentials). If so, then you should be all set... finish the wizard and fire up Outlook, put in username and password when prompted (usually more than once) and sit back and wait for your mailbox to cache. You did choose cached mode, didn't you?

If this didn't work for you, then try this:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following subkey:
1. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\RPC
3. If the RPC key does not exisit, Right-click on the Outlook key and select New Key and call it RPC.
4. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type DefConnectOpts, and then press ENTER.
6. Right-click DefConnectOpts, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
8. Exit Registry Editor.
9. Close Outlook and re-open it.

Of course, if the wizard failed then start from the top after adding the registry key... and hopefully things should work as expected...

Sky broadband #2

Oh and I forgot to mention... when I got home from work today, the lil green internet LED was lit, and I was overjoyed! Just one day past my promised activation date I have broadband again! Happy days :-)

Now I just need to check why its connecting at 8mb instead of 16mb... oh dear....
;-)

Sky Broadband niggles...

Right, so after my various telecoms-related nightmares, I'm awaiting activation of Sky broadband on my line... to ease the wait, they've sent me a shiny new "Sky Broadband" router. Which is incidentally identical (apart from the Sky branding) to my trusty Netgear DG834GT-UK.

Or so I thought until I plugged it in and turned it on. It turns out that it's all very neatly pre-configured for my broadband service (I guess this explains why I went mad looking for a broadband username and password), and wireless (WPA-PSK out of the box!) etc.

Great... except for one little thing. Or two. 1. They negelected to give me the username and password for my router. OK, I know they sent it to me and so it may be theirs and not mine, but it's in my house and I therefor have a right to configure it ;-). So a couple of guesses, and yup it's admin and sky. How clever - they can't blame anyone for accessing the router interface if they make things downright bleedin' obvious.
2. They've customised the firmware on the box so I can't actually access the screens relating to the authentication and ADSL settings. I suppose this is for my own protection... after all anyone ordering Sky broadband must be incapable of doing anything but harm here, right? Or is it to prevent their own tech support from getting ambitious and actually trying to troubleshoot?

Well, whatever the reasons, for reasons of territorial sovereignty as stated above, I decided I must know what my broadband username and password were. Time to tether the phone and get Googling.

I found a promising looking forum at www.skyuser.co.uk and an interesting thread here. Beware, this thread is 9 pages of firmware flashing, flashing LEDs, disclaimers, MAC codes, hex passwords and general discombobulated obfuscation. OK actually they're all trying to figure it out and help, so maybe not that last bit. After spending half an hour there, I went back to Google and found a MUCH easier way... here. Easy peasy. :-)

Bulldog broadband woes and hooray for BT (kinda)

Ok so I finally gave my pain-in-the-ass ISP (Bulldog) the boot a few weeks ago. Actually, I didn't, but they thought I had (I had called about a billing issue - one of several - and while I did threaten cancellation, I didn't actually go through with it), and I certainly didn't argue. Until they decided to charge me for the rest of the year because I was still under contract. So of course I refused to pay, since (a) they owed me a fair sum by way of several credits that had been "applied" but never turned up (b) THEY cancelled the connection, not me (I later found out the request was indeed put thru by one of their departments - because of a resolved billing issue) (c) I hadn't received the service I was promised anyway (my connection only worked for about half the period), (d) I shouldn't have been under a fresh 12-month contract since I had only moved home and wasn't a new customer.

So anyway, after a while I managed placed an order with BT to move my line back from Bulldog. The nice man at BT seemed shocked that I didn't care if I kept my phone number or not. What can I say... I wouldn't even know it if I didn't need to identify my line when I called my (ex) ISP. They accepted my order and gave me a date by which this should be completed. Needless to say, this didn't happen, and I got a call from BT to say that my line hadn't been released by Bulldog and I couldn't do anything but pay for a new physical line to be installed. I was surprised with this and tried to argue that I had a perfectly good length of copper from my living room to the exchange. No point. Hang up in despair. I called BT later that evening to place an order for a new line (this is several weeks into the whole issue, and I was getting tired of "borrowing" ;-) wireless from neighbours and using my phone to connect up.) - anyway just as I was about to give them my bank details, my phone lost signal and the call disappeared. Oh great. I was almost home at that point and couldn't muster the energy for another session so I left it be until the next day.

Mid-morning, my phone rings and lo and behold, a call from BT provisioning... very proactive I thought, calling me since my call dropped. But then again, they want to make the sale, right? Well that's what I thought until I was told that this call pertained to my original order, not the dropped call one. Eh? What's that? I thought that order was cancelled and couldn't be put through. Rubbish, said the BT man (well not quite), the order was alive and well. They were having trouble getting Bulldog to release the line so in line with regulations, they had given them 10 working days (or some such) to release the line before grabbing it from them. 1 June was the latest activation date, and I was given my new phone number (they seemed surprised Woo hoo I say. Excellent. So I don't have to suffer the pain (& cost) of seeing someone install a second phone line at home! And whaddya know? True to their word, 1 June saw a brand new phone number operational in number 19!

Next choice was broadband ISP and I went for the one obvious consumer ISP - Sky. Since we've got Sky digital, the broadband deal is pretty good and I had actually heard quite a lot of good things about Sky (despite having had BAD experiences in the very early days). So, juicy 16mb broadband ordered, sit back and wait...

And hope never to have to have the displeasure or misfortune of hearing from Bulldog again.

Next month I migrate my last still-on-Bulldog client away and hopefully that should be that.