A new MVP is here from Egypt

I am pleased to announce and share with you all that I have been awarded the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Enterprise Security Area. It was a very exciting moment opening and going through the congratulations email.

Attached is the exact mail that I received.

“

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2013 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Enterprise Security technical communities during the past year.

“

I am really honored to be associated with a great group of technical people around the whole world.  I’ll be aiming to continue my efforts to support the IT community all over the world and especially in my country and region for the next coming years. 

Thanks to everyone who supported me for the last year. Thanks for all my Blog followers, readers, friends........etc. I won't have made it without your feedback and comments.

Thanks to Microsoft for their support to the IT community and for recognizing our efforts.

You may check my MVP Profile here.

Thanks again to everyone.

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Running Lync 2013 client on DirectAccess Computer

I am a big fan of Microsoft DirectAccess technology, for those who are not aware of DirectAccess, Its Microsoft new Remote connectivity solution where users on the Internet get Intranet connectivity to their corporate network without installing any client or initiating any software like old traditional VPN.

Microsoft DirectAccess is purely based on IPV6 and Lync 2013 is fully supporting IPV6 and Lync 2013 clients using DirectAccess should work without any problem.

If any one encountered problems making Lync calls or connecting to Lync on a DirectAccess Computer then you need to ensure that IPV6 is enabled on the Lync 2013 Server as per the below image.

This can be achieved as follows:

1. Open the Lync 2013 Topology Builder from an old file or download the topology
2. Edit the properties of the Lync server and in the General Properties ensure that IPV6 is enabled.
3. These settings need to be published from the Action Menu - Topology - Publish

Now you can enjoy Lync 2013 over DirectAccess Connection.

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Cracking Wireless WEP using BackTrack article published in Hack Insight Magazine

A couple of month ago i was asked by the Hack Insight Magazine editor to write an article on the famous BackTrack 5.0 R3. Hack Insight - a line of Hack Insight Press which is the new publication devoted to IT Security. Its a good Magazine with different security articles on different platforms.

It was a new experience and i was really excited with this kind of publication. I picked the Wireless WEP cracking as i can see many people still adopting it, this article will show how easy to crack a WEP key using BackTrack.

My Article was published on the March 2013 volume. The link to download/Read the article is: http://www.hackinsight.org/articles.php?article_id=8



So Take a look and let me know what do you think :)

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Microsoft Lync 2010 client / XP machines connectivity with Lync 2013 Server

After a successful implementation of the Microsoft Lync 2013 we faced a problem with our legacy Windows XP machines that are still existing on the network and need to access the Lync 2013 server. This was not possible because Lync 2013 client is only supported on Windows 7 or Windows 8. The Lync Web client doesn't support all features especially the Audio/Video conference features on XP machines (Greyed out).

As a solution we tried using Lync 2010 full client on Windows XP machines. When we try to login from Lync 2010 Client in the Windows XP or even Windows 7 we received the below error.

“Microsoft Lync 2010 is not a version that can be used to sign in to the server”

 
In Order to allow backward compatibility for Lync 2010 clients on Lync 2013 server, you need to do the following:
 

1. Open Lync 2013 Control Panel
2. Click on Clients – Client Version Policy
3. Click the “Global Policy” – Edit – Show details
4. Double Click “UCCP”
5. At the bottom under Action: select “allow”  - Ok
6. Back to the Global Policy Settings Select OC Version 4.0.7.7577.4103 and allow it as previous policy (Default was block)

 The below screen shot is provided for more elaboration.

 

 



Hopefully this should be helpful for anyone facing the same problem.

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Microsoft Update List for Hyper-V

A lot of IT Professionals are moving to Hyper-V and they need to keep updated with all Hyper-V hotfixes, updates and Service Packs. The Below links are for Hyper-V on both Windows 2012 and Windows 2008R2. Some of these updates/fixes are intended to fix specific problem, so don’t apply them unless you have this specific issue. 

1.       Windows 2008R2 Hyper-V

 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1349.hyper-v-update-list-for-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

 

2.       Windows 2012 Hyper-V 

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15576.hyper-v-update-list-for-windows-server-2012.aspx

 

Thanks to the above wiki creators.

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UAG 2010 File Access application fails to open/start after UAG 2010 SP3 implementation

After the install of UAG 2010 SP3, all of the portal applications worked fine except for the File Access application. I tried several options with the application, removing it and adding it back but never worked till I asked my friend Ben Ari (UAG Senior Escalation engineer) as I thought it was depreciated. It turned out to be a glitch or bug after implementing the UAG 2010 SP3 and to fix you need to do the following:

 

1.       On the UAG server, Navigate to the following folder under UAG installation folder \Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway\von\FileAccess

2.       Edit the file “default.asp” (I took a backup first before any change)

3.       Modify the word cint to parseInt on Line 20 (Or you can search the file as it appears once). Make sure that the “I” in “parseInt” is written in caps (Check below screenshot)

 

 

4.       Save and activate your Forefront UAG

 It should be noted that incase there are more than one UAG server in the array, this change should be applied on all servers manually by the same method and steps above.

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UAG 2010 Portal error 403.14 after applying UAG 2010 SP3

The UAG 2010 SP3 was officially released on Feb 20, 2013 as promised by the UAG team to resolve several issues mainly to support Microsoft new systems and applications (Windows 8, Server 2012, Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013...............etc). Thanks UAG team.

Download Link:  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36788

Release Notes: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2744025


I will discuss my SP3 installation process and my comments for a successful implementation in another Post. One of the main issues that i faced after the installation of the UAG 2010 SP3 was that all my users were unable to access the UAG Portal page or any published site on the UAG (Mail OWA, SharePoint............etc) and the following error is Displayed:

Forbidden Directory, Listing Denied Error code 403.14

Microsoft has a good KB that deals with this error (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961172) however in my case i needed to reboot the IIS later on. The Steps done to fix this issue is as follows:

1. Open Forefront UAG management on the UAG server.
2. Open/Explore the Trunks under the HTTP and/or HTTPS connections.
3. Right click each Trunk and select Disable.
4. Save and Activate the UAG configuration.
5. Right Click the trunks again and select enable.
6. Save and Activate the Configuration again.
7. Open the IIS Manager
8. Highlight your server name and from the actions hit restart to restart the IIS. This should do the trick.

Hopefully this should help anyone facing this problem after UAG SP3.

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