Messaging and Collaboration

Exchange Server 2010: Server Roles Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 provides new technologies, features, functionality and services to the communication and messaging product line. Exchange 2010 is a comprehensive, integrated, and flexible messaging solution for small business to enterprise. Exchange Server contains five different roles. Exchange configuration and server roles deployment depends on individual need and licenses you bought. Five different roles and their functionality are: Mailbox Server This server can host mailboxes and public folders. A mailbox server also contains address lists, Calendar Repair, E-Mail Address Policies, Exchange 2010 Store, Exchange Search, Importing and Exporting Mailbox Data,Inbox Rules, move Requests,Recipients. Mailbox server interact with rest of the servers holding the following roles and also with Microsoft Active Directory. Client Access Server This is the server that hosts the client protocols, such as Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3), Intern

Telnet is a great tool and was once used for logging into Unix machines. Its not used for that purpose now and has been largly replaced by SSH. But this tool is great for manually connection to and sending mail. Essentially what we are about todo is what SMTP VM does when it needs to send mail to another domain. If for some reason you cant send mail to a certain domain (because you think you have been blacklisted) or you just want to check that mail is working then telnet can be used for this purpose. What you need? The best way to use this tool is by using the FQDN of the endpoint. This is found by using nslookup or dig etc. But you can use the IP address also. Just substitute IP address for FQDN in the commands. Lets do it. Get a command prompt up and type: telnet FQDN 25 The “25” is the listening port number of SMTP service. If the end point is listening on that port you should get a welcome message like this: 220 server.domain.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.379 0.18

Eseutil is very powerful. It can get you out of a tight spot (as in you don’t have a backup). But the best way to recover exchange databases and transaction files is restore from backup. This is why proper regular and exchange aware backups are so important. List of Eseutil switches for Windows Exchange Eseutil /cc Performs a hard recovery after a database restore. Eseutil /d Performs an offline compaction of a database. Eseutil /g Verifies the integrity of a database. Eseutil /k Verifies the checksums of a database. Eseutil /m Generates formatted output of various database file types. e.g. /mh Eseutil /p Repairs a corrupted or damaged database. Eseutil /r Performs soft recovery to bring a single database into a consistent or clean shutdown state. Eseutil /y Copies a database, streaming file, or log file. Eseutil /mh This switch to esutil just determines if the last un-mount was clean or dirty. To see if this is the case, examine the output. Look for the text, “State: Clean Shutdown

Message store, storage groups and things related to them account for a large proportion of issues with exchange. I want to suggest some tips and tricks and things that I do to cover the kind of problems I have seen and may help you, the busy Exchange administrator. The most common problem is that the message store just un-mounts. Seemingly for no reason. The users start ringing you or come and tap you on the shoulder because outlook has frozen and they cant do any work. And suddenly you go from hero to zero in a heart beat. So what kind of issues catch you out? Out of LOG space Mail floods Hit the size limits of the Database Out of Log space. There are 3 main reasons that you can get into problems with not having enough space for the transaction logs. The primary reason is that the backups havent run for some reason. Exchange aware Backups do not just backup the files to tape. The other function of Exchange aware backups is that they flush the committed transaction logs after they hav

As a prerequisite step of the Exchange 2003 install process you have to perform a setup “/forestprep” and followed by a setup “/domainprep”. But why? And what does this do? If you look at the above table you can see that there are a number of AD partitions that are used by exchange. Some of the AD partitions are forest wide and some domain wide. Therefore the “/forestprep” populates the Schema and configuration partitions and “/domainprep” populates the domain partition. For the option “/forestprep”, this makes changes to the configuration partition and extends the Schema partition to allow exchange attributes to be added. “/Forestprep” also creates the Exchange Administrator object and gives permissions to that object. But what about “/domainprep”? And why would you need to run it on the parent domain and the child domain? The only reason you normally have to run /”domainprep” in the parent domain is if you have any Global Catalogue servers installed there and, of course an exchange e

ou have performed some basic mail tests right? If not, go here. DNS I cant begin to say how important DNS is to a properly functioning exchange system. I wont go into the why’s and wherefores of an DNS system as this is way beyond what I am trying to do here. Just give you what you need to know. There are some great tools out there to help you. Some you have to pay for. But I try and use the tools that come with the system. By and large they work great. The most basic is nslookup. But nslookup only tells you part of the story. Nslookup is a client tool really and not server class. For server class tools we need Dcdiag and DnsLint. The syntax pages for Dcdiag is here The syntax pages for Dnslint is here Note: Dcdiag is part of resource kit tools (reskit). Lets start with Dcdiag. This is a great tool for diagnosing Domain Controller issues or problems. But we are interested in DNS right? So lets focus on those parts of the test. Of course you could run all the tests. But that provides wa

You can get this when opening Admin tools, Component services., Console root, Component Services, My Computer, COM+ Applications. This is caused by MSDTC (Distributed transaction coordinator) Service being set to run under the local system account. Or the service is not running. Often this service is disabled on Exchange servers. Check to see if the service is running…. Start services (services.msc) locate “Distributed Transaction Coordinator” and check the “Log On tab”. Change the Log on account to NT Authority\NetworkService Just type NT Authority\NetworkService the Password is left blank. If you have done the above and your still getting Error code 8004E00F when you try to view Component services, you need to do this…. Run regedt32 and locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSDTC. Check to see if the DWORD value “TurnOffRpcSecurity” exists. If yes, change the data value to “1”. If the key does not exist, add a DWORD value TurnOffRpcSecurity with a value data of 1. Stop service