A single user gets "Access Denied" on SharePoint Site

I came across permission issue, were only a single user gets "Access Denied" on SharePoint site. The user was able to access the site (his was added to the Visitors group) for one day, then all of a sudden he cannot access the site. I checked his permission and I could not see any reason for this user to get the error. I even tried to give him full control and that didn't work. I have created a new site collection and added him as a Visitor and he could access the newly created site collection. Since troubleshooting permission issues are difficult, I did download third party tool (i got the 14 days trial version) and installed it on a development machine, then moved the site to the development farm and the user still got the access denied error. I ran the tool and could not see any special permissions. So after further trials and errors, I came to the following resolution:

1. Added the user to the Site Collection Administrator (SCA) group, and now the user is able to access the site without issues.
2. Removed the user from the SCA group and that removed all his permissions, and he got the access denied error.
3. Added the user back to the Visitors group and now he could access without issues.

Not sure why the above steps fixed the issue, but I suspect by adding him to the SCA group and removing him, which remove the user's permissions from all SharePoint objects, and by adding the user again is like adding him for the first time. I guess at this point we will have to wait and see if the user runs into this issue again.

Outlook Issues after upgrading to Exchange 2010

After we had upgraded to Exchange 2010, two users could not open Outlook since it kept on crashing every time whether they were using Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010. Checking the application log after the crash reveled the following error:

HelloEvent Type: Error
Event Source: Microsoft Office 12
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date:  8/13/2010
Time:  8:53:47 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: Computer Name
Description:
Faulting application outlook.exe, version 12.0.4518.1014, stamp 4542840f, faulting module emsmdb32.dll, version 12.0.4518.1014, stamp 45428079, debug? 0, fault address 0x000524b7.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Searched the net and found Matt Parkinson's Blog, that describes the fix for the issue. However, even after we checked for msExchQueryBaseDN, users still had the issue, so all we did to remedy the issue is to remove the Outlook profile and re-created using the following steps (this was done on Windows 7 machine, but the steps are the same for other Windows OS like Vista and XP):

1. Go to Control Panel and look for the Mail icon and double click on it.

2. Click on Show Profiles

3. Highlight the profile and select Remove, then click on Apply

4. Once the profile removed, click on Add and type in the profile name, then click on OK

5. Launch Outlook and it should open without crashing.

Desktop Authority and Firewall issues

We have installed ScriptLogic Desktop Authority on a server and needed to install a short cut on our workstation so that we don't have to log in to the server each time we need to work on the application. After we create the shot cut and tried to launch the Desktop Authority Console we got the following message:
"The Desktop Authority Manager requires that the 'Desktop Authority OpsMaster Service' is running."

Checked the service on the server and it was running and we were able to launch the application on the server, so we turned-off Windows Firewall on the server and launched the application without any issues. So, we used TCPView tool to find which port we need to open on the firewall. The output from the tool showed the following:

It shows the remote port 8017 on the server is blocked. So, we went back to the server and created an exception for port 8017 and enabled the firewall again, and we were able to launch Desktop Authority from the workstation.

ScriptLogic "A connection to the database could not be created. would you like to select s different database?"

I was assigned a task to install and configure ScriptLogic Enterprise Security Reporter 3. Everything seemed to go well until we launched the Discovery Console from the start menu. Every time we launch the console we get the following dialog box:

If we click on Yes then a new dialog box open for us to select the database in order to connect to it:

This becomes annoying, and it seems that something is blocking the connection. So, in the process of troubleshooting, we disabled the firewall on the SQL box and  everything worked fine and we no longer got the dialog box that we need to connect manually to the database. However, disabling firewall is not recommended and we determined to find which port needs to be opened on the SQL machine, so we downloaded Sysinternal Suite from Microsoft site and used TCPView and got the following output:

As we see from the previous screen shot that we need to open port 50972 on SQL firewall, and once we did that everything worked fine and we no longer get the dialog box.

Here is a good TCPView output:

You gotta love Systinternals Suite

That's all