The other steveb - Steve Banks' Blog on SBS, EBS, and other Small Business Technology Topics : Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Team Veteran Scott Roberts will be at the PSSBS meeting tonight in Redmond!

steveb — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:42:00 GMT

Scott Roberts has 12+ years at Microsoft under his belt and is currently the Test Lead for the Exchange CXP [Sustained Engineering] team here in Redmond. For over 5 years, he has been on the Exchange CXP team and before that he was the tester for DSAccess and other Directory related tools. Scott was also responsible for manually testing IMAP/SMTP/POP3 for an older Microsoft Product called MCIS.

Scott lives in Redmond and has resided in Washington for over 12 years. He is looking to attend several of the Washington State user groups over the next year to answer any questions that may arise around servicing, tools, Microsoft Update, and other related areas so that he can ensure that the CXP team properly understands the customer scenarios that are out there.

If you are a user group leader in the northwest and would like to get connected with Scott for possible presentations, drop me a note with your email address and I'll make sure it gets over to Scott. Possible topics he'll consider for group meetings include:

1. Servicing via Microsoft Update, WSUS, SMS/Systems Center, 3^rd Party

2. Silent install versus UI based install

3. Servicing Cluster Scenarios

4. Servicing E14 DAG Scenarios

5. E12 specific servicing pain points

6. E14 Rollup 1 experience

7. Servicing SBS

For those of you in the Bellevue area tonight, head on over to the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group meeting in Lincoln Square. Check out http://www.pssbs.org/about/ for directions.

A newly created recipient may not receive e-mail messages for up to 4 hours

steveb — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:42:00 GMT

Thanks to Susan Bradley for bringing my attention to this Microsoft KB. It looks like in Essential Business Server 2008 if you create a new recipient and attempt to send them mail, it can take up to four hours for the Exchange Edge Server to synch up to the Messaging Server unless you manually run the Start-EdgeSynchronization cmdlet and force a synch, resulting in a 550 5.1.1 User unknown NDR being generated.

See Microsoft KB 961303 for the details. Looks like they are still updating the KB as of this time.

Steve

IISReset /noforce

steveb — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:51:00 GMT

Pearl of wisdom from Mark Stanfill:

On Exchange Servers, always run IISReset with the /noforce switch (“IISreset /noforce”) to ensure it doesn't force any services off. Check out this TechNet article for additional info.

Thanks Mark!

Default SMTP Virtual Server instance would not start after System State Restore

steveb — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:44:00 GMT

The Default SMTP Virtual Server instance was failing to start after recovering from a System State Backup. Because this was a Domain Controller the server had to be started in Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM) in order to do the ntbackup restore. When booted into DSRM, Chkdsk kicked in and did a scan before launching into Safe Mode. What I didn't know initially was that Chkdsk had gotten hold of the Exchange 'Queue' directory. Here is what we did to bring it back and recover the previously queued mail.

When the Default SMTP Virtual Server was failing to start, the application log reported event id 429 which mentioned that the specified mail queue directory is not valid. We checked the ’vsi 1’ folder and found that the ‘Queue’ folder was missing and in its place was a file with the name ‘Queue’. We deleted the file and created a folder named ‘Queue’. Once this was done, we were able to start the Default SMTP Virtual Server instance.

Now that Exchange was running again with its new ‘Queue’ folder that was great, but what happened to the messages that were previously in the Exchange Queue before the System State Restore had been done? We found that checkdisk had placed them in the ‘Found.000’ folder. We replayed the messages by putting them back into the ‘Pickup’ folder. Mail normally flows into the Pickup folder first and then will automatically move to the Queue folder before moving into individual mailboxes. There ended up being a couple corrupt ones that would just sit in the Queue folder so we deleted those in Windows Explorer.

ExBPA and ExTRA

steveb — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:06:00 GMT

Prashant Joseph who works with Microsoft's Enterprise Messaging Support sent this to me at the resolution of a call Monday morning. Great stuff so passing it along. What I thought was cool is there is also a URL redirector for the ExBPA at www.exbpa.com if you want a quick link to get there.

Notes from Prashant:

1)       ExBPA (Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool)

-          This is a tool which can help you to generate reports regarding your Exchange server and Organization.
-          This can be installed on either the Exchange server or a client machine.
-          The reports generated by this tool provide information regarding any critical Exchange issue. It also provides a link to some online documentation which provide either information or a solution to the issue.

•         The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=dbab201f-4bee-4943-ac22-e2ddbd258df3&displaylang=en


2)     ExTRA (Exchange Server Troubleshooting Assistant)

-    The Microsoft Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant can help to determine the cause of performance, mail flow and database mounting issues on computers running Microsoft Exchange Server. The tool automates specialized troubleshooting steps for identified symptoms.
-    This can be installed on either the Exchange server or a client machine.

* The Exchange Server Troubleshooting Assistant can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4BDC1D6B-DE34-4F1C-AEBA-FED1256CAF9A&displaylang=en

3)     Antivirus and Exchange.

•         Antivirus software’s can cause numerous issues on an Exchange server. In order to prevent this there are a few things that need to be taken care of:-

Ø       File level Antivirus software’s.

# In case if we are using a file level Antivirus software then we need to make sure that the right Exclusions have been setup.
# The following folders must be excluded from Virus scanning:-

a)       INETPUB (The default location is C drive)
b)       INETSRV (The default location is C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32)
c)       The Exchange database folder.
d)       The Exchange log files folder.

•         The below mentioned KB article talks about Exchange and Antivirus.
           http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328841/en-us