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Offline Address Book download error 0x80190197 Operation failed

Situation: Exchange 2007 SP1 + Outlook 2007. Offline Address book in public folders and on HTTP distribution point.

I recently noticed that my machine and others were no longer downloading the OAB. Outlook of course didn't notify me, we just noticed it because some new accounts were not showing up. When I did a manual download of the OAB, I get the pretty meaningless Error 0x80190197 The Operation Failed

The Exchange server itself looked fine, the OAB was being generated and replicated, no errors.

I did a quick network trace to check what Outlook is doing while downloading the OAB, and to my surprise I saw no traffic to the actual Exchange server hosting the OAB. I did notice much traffic to my proxy server however, which was suspicious since I was not doing anything but getting the OAB at this point.

I then checked my proxy settings in IE, and sure enough, the "Bypass proxy server for local addresses" was not configured properly. I added some internal IPs, addreses and the Exchange server, and I was able to download the OAB again.

Delegating permissions to write SPNs in Active Directory

A follow-up to the post below.

I tried delegating the ability to write SPNs (Service Prinicipal Names, used for Kerberos) to a non-Domain admin who did not have full control on the server objects. Since this is a really big organization I also did not want to grant him full control on those objects (Politics...)

I thought delegating this shouldn't be a big deal, so I gave his account the permission "Validated write to service principal name" and applied to all computer objects in the servers OUs.

Of course it doesn't work. Instead of "insufficient permissions" we now got the error 0x200b/8203 -> The attribute syntax speified to the directory service is invalid. when using SETSPN.

I checked Microsoft's documentation, and sure enough it says I only need "Validated write to service principal name". I used the network to see what it actually tries to write, and it only seems to be the SPN attribute.

I then assigned full control to the account, and then he was able to write the SPNs. Long story short, after some educated guessing it looks like he also needs the "write public information" permission.

error 0x20b5/8373 when registering a SPN

We recently delegated permissions to register SPNs to a network administrator. When he tried to register a SPN using setspn, he got this message:

error 0x20b5/8373 The name reference is invalid

We found the solution quickly: He was providing an invalid SPN (the error message could be a little clearer)...
Instead of doing HOST/Servername he had used HOST\Servername

To summarize: When you get this error, make your SPN is correct regarding syntax etc.

Custom Presence States for Office Communicator R2 2007

There's plenty of examples on how to create custom presence states in OCS 2007.
Check out this example.

If you want to do this in OCS 2007 R2 it is still possible using the same approach, but you cannot use a FILE location. It MUST be an HTTPS location.