SonicWALL Announces SSL-VPN 200 Appliance

One of the companies that I really like to work with right now is SonicWall. They have great products, a great partner program and very good customer service. I think that their firewall products really do a great job in combination with an SBS box that even runs ISA Server 2004.

However, this little box may be a great little sell for the SMB out there that wants simple VPN capabilities with no mess or fuss. The SonicWALL SSL-VPN 200 is a great little box that has an SSL web page that clients can go to and get right into applications without the need for pulling down a VPN client. It's very secure and for the price of $595 for the 5-10 user 200 version is a great little piece for the SMB out there.

I've been a Citrix guy for a long time and their SMB access Essentials product does a lot of the same stuff. But put one of these Sonicwall boxes onto the network and you get similar technologies. However you still have to remember that the SBS box doesn't allow terminal services in application mode so that extra server may still be necessary if you want apps shared over the business. However you can't get any easier for a VPN than this.

Check out the live demo on the page above.

SBS Backup Error Code 0x800710d8

Here's something to try if you have a consistent error of 0x800710d8 coming up in the SBS backup log.
Error code "0x800710d8" means "The object identifier does not represent a valid object."


This issue can occur if the internal Removable Storage Manager (RSM)
database is corrupted. This corruption prevents media pools from being
created or accessed. To resolve this issue, use the following method to
manually initialize an uncorrupted RSM database.


a. Start the Computer Management tool, double-click Services and
Applications, and then click Services.
b. Locate and stop the Removable Storage service (or change the startup
type from Automatic to Disabled), and then restart the computer.
c. Start Windows Explorer, open the %SystemRoot%\System32\Ntmsdata folder,
and then rename the existing files in this folder so that they have an .old
file extension, or copy the files to a different folder.
d. Restart the Removable Storage service (or change the startup type from
Disabled to Automatic), and then restart the computer.


After the RSM restarts, it creates a new database.

Bill Gates Keynote at CES

If you like tech gadgets like I do you probably want to know what is on the horizon. The CES show in Las Vegas seems to be the new Comdex with everything electronic and technical there. Bill Gates gave the keynote, a very long keynote. Check it out online.

You might be interested in the Palm Treo 700W especially if you're running SBS.

Exchange Event 12002 and Attachment Problems

Recently had a client that had an Exchange 2000 Enterprise Edition Information Store crash. Really the entire server crashed and we had to do a restore to get it going again. However the Information store was not backed up properly and had crashed. Once we got Windows 2000 Server up and running the Information Store wouldn't load.

So we ran the eseutil program with the -p to fix the Info Store. After that the Information Store did indeed load, however we were getting some weird problems and errors in the log. All of them dealt with attachments that the users tried to either open or forward or send in Outlook. Here's the Event 12002:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeIS
Event Category: Content Engine
Event ID: 12002
Date: 1/3/2006
Time: 10:57:09 PM
User: N/A Computer:
TCSCS_EXCH Description: Error 8004010F-80000000 occurred while processing message <> from 'System Administrator'.

Users were also getting "could not open one or more attachments" in Outlook or a "send error" when they tried to send an attachment.

Here's what we did to resolve it:
1. Run Isinteg -fix -test -alltests again to verify there is no error/warning. Note: Repeat the Isinteg command until the number of database fixes reaches 0 (zero) or does not change.
2. Offline defragment the database with eseutil /d.

Note: Online backup is needed after offline defragment.

After the defrag the Private store size went from 16GB to 3 GB. Pretty big jump.