TIL Apple removed support for exporting uncompressed AVIs from OS X Lion (10.7)

We’ve been struggling with Lion ever since it landed on our machines. From the first day we’ve had nothing but problems with it. First we couldn’t get it bind to our Active Directory correctly, then we ran into issues with it not binding when on DHCP, then it started screwing with DNS (E.g. removing A records for our domain controllers), then we found that there was no support for some of the software we need, and now we find that Apple has, in its infinite wisdom, REMOVED the ability to export videos as uncompressed AVIs. And on top of that, no one at Apple knows ANYTHING about this or WHY it was done. The best answer i got, after spending hours of searching online and talking with Apple tech support reps, was that it was a “Quicktime engineering decision” and that “they aren’t privy to that information.” Give me a fu@%!ng break. Apple’s best suggestion was that we export the projects as a .mov files and then find a 3rd party tool to convert .mov files to .avi files. 

Anyways, the short of the long story is that Apple OS X Lion (10.7) no longer supports exporting anything as an uncompressed AVI. This goes for pretty much any application. We confirmed this for Final Cut Pro 7, all of the final cut studio apps, and all of the adobe creative suite apps. I’m not really an expert with Apple products (Though I’m slowly becoming one…) but it appears that all of these apps (FCS and Adobe CS) use the same underlying functionality to export AVIs. The interface that comes up when you actually go to configure the AVI settings is identical across all of these apps. The Apple tech support rep i spoke with confirmed that the interface used to configure these codec settings was indeed an operating system component and not something specific to the application.

This just confirms what i’ve always thought of Apple. They make beautiful well designed products that computer-illiterate people can use and they also push the industry forward by continually innovating. But they do all of this without the slightest concern or care for how it will affect their customers. While this may work in the consumer world, it won’t last long in the business world. Businesses can’t afford to invest in a platform which will continually force them to alter their business processes and spend money just because the vendor decides it doesn’t want to support certain features anymore. In today’s business world, supporting legacy features is a must. And if Apple refuses to do so, they will eventually lose business to friendlier competitors who will. 

And if you don’t believe me, just look at the Final Cut Pro X iMovie Pro X debacle and the major push back Apple received from the industry. You can’t just go cutting out this and that because you don’t think anyone needs it anymore. That’s not how businesses work. 

Now, if i could just find that damn stress ball… 

And yes, i ripped off the TIL (Today I Learned) idea from Reddit… along with the rage meme.  

6 September 6 Permalink

Exchange 2010 Autodiscover Issue

So the other day at work i ran into a very usual problem with Exchange 2010 and the Autodiscover service. We discovered the problem when a user submitted a ticket claiming his blackberry wasn’t synchronizing correctly. He said his email was working fine but his contacts and calendar items were not. He also mentioned that he was getting a username & password dialog box when he opened Outlook.

We tried the usual troubleshooting. The first thing we ran into was that when he would open Outlook and enter his username and password it would immediately lock his account. (Still not sure why. Could be related to this problem discussed below. Not really sure) We logged into his account from another workstation and had the same issues. Juts for fun, we logged onto his workstation with a valid test account and didn’t have any the above problems.  

One of the things we noticed when setting up his Outlook profile on the test workstation was that for some reason Outlook wasn’t able to autoconfigure his profile using Autodiscover. We tested this on a few other computers and got the same result. When we would try the same thing as a test user (or any other valid user) autoconfigure/autodiscover worked fine. The autodiscover service didn’t like his account for some reason. 

So now i went from thinking there’s something wrong with this guy’s account to there’s something wrong with AutoDiscover in general. I immediately pulled up the EMS and ran a Test-OutlookWebServices test on his account. (Test-OutlookWebServices -Identity:[username]) I got the following result:

Obviously we have a problem here. Fearing we might have a larger issue on our hands, I immediately tried the same command on a few other users and found that Autodiscover was working for most of our users but not for all. The issue only seemed to affect certain people. 

Upon examining the results of the OutlookWebServices test a bit further, one particular error stood out. “Autodiscover returned the error: 603:The Active Directory user wasn’t found.” I went straight to the source of all knowledge, Google, and looked the error up. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to be found. The two things i did find suggested that the only solution they knew of was to disable the user’s mailbox, delete their AD account, recreate the AD account, and then reconnect the mailbox. They claimed this fixed the issue but also said that they had no idea why this fixed the problem. 

Seeing as i really hate solutions to problems that offer no explenation as to WHY the problem occured or WHAT fixed the problem, i kept looking.

The first thing i did was pull up AdExplorer (ADSIEdit works too) and look at the AD account of one of the affected users. One of the first things i noticed was a key called “msExchDelegateListBL” that contained a link to several AD users that no longer had exchange mailboxes. 

Ahah! So it appears that Exchange/Outlook is trying to connect to those mailboxes even though they’ve been deleted. This is the problem! you see, our standard practice when asked to deactivate an account is to delete the mailbox but keep the AD account. I really don’t know why we do this but that’s the policy. So it sounds like Exchange isn’t cleaning up after itself when we delete or disable mailboxes. (Pesky M$ bugs…) 

To fix the problem, the first thing i tried was opening the key and removing the non-existent mailboxes. I promptly received the error “Unable to update attribute: A constraint violation occured.” After another google search i found out that the msExchDelegateListBL attribute (BL meaning back link) is linked to the msExchDelegateListLink attribute. So in order to remove the entries from the msExchDelegateListBL attribute of the current user you have to open the AD account of the user mentioned and remove the entry from that user’s msExchDelegateListLink attribute. This will remove the entry from the original user in question. 

As soon as i removed the links to non-existent accounts, Autodiscover magically started working again, the outlookwebservices test stopped erroring, the user’s blackberry began syncing contacts and calendar items and we were able to configure his Outlook profile via autoconfiguration/autodiscover. (The username and password dialog also stopped showing up.) Problem solved!

The last thing i did, to ensure that this problem didn’t exist/happen to anyone else, was an ldifde dump for all of the AD accounts that no longer have mailboxes but still exist in AD. (We move all of these types of accounts to a specific OU so it was fairly easy) I then filtered the results for any accounts that contained data in the msExchDelegateListLink attribute. Fortunately there were only a handful so I was able to go through those accounts and removed the links. 

Anyways, the main reason for writing this is to put it out there on the interwebs for others to find. I wasn’t able to find a definitive solution to this problem that both fixed the issue and explained why it occurred. I hope this post sheds some light on the problem and helps those of you who are having the same issue get it resolved. Hopefully Microsoft squashes this bug in an update sometime soon. 

15 August 2 Permalink