Exchange and the loss of single instance storage

Great post up on the Exchange Team blog about SIS. I have talked about this to many customers, and it's nice to have a link to refer people to for an explanation.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/02/22/454051.aspx

In short, single instance storage was invented when disks were expensive and massive amounts of storage cost companies a lot more money. It worked great on that scale. As Exchange gained in popularity, and those users gained data, the disk planning for Exchange became more important, as the random I/O that SIS wrote took more time to read in than a sequential I/O. By moving to a sequential read/write model, they were able to vastly improve IOPS. So now, disk space is cheap and plentiful. Server level 2TB disks are here/coming soon, and I have a few customers with plans to do DAG's on 2TB SATA's.

Uninstalling Exchange 2003 - 8240 error - 0x80072030

Ran into this one today, and hadn't encountered it in quite some time.



This error is due to the fact that someone had listed their own user as the postmaster account in Exchange 2003, and that person had since left the organization and had their account deleted.

So the error above is shown:
Setup encountered an error while checking prerequisites For the component "Microsoft Exchange":
0X80072030 (8240): There is no such object on the server.

This is easily fixed in ADSIEdt.msc - first, let's find out the user.



I've clipped the name to protect the guilty :)

As you can see, the deleted Objects distinguishedName here shows the user selected as the msExchAdminMailbox has been deleted.

In ADSIEdit, browse to CN=Configuration, DC=DOMAINNAME,DC=Com\CN=Services\CN=Microsoft
Exchange\CN=EXCHANGEORGNAME\CN=Global Settings\CN=Message Delivery. Go to the properties of Message Delivery, and scroll down to the msExchAdminMailbox.

Now, we need to fix the error. Pick who you want to be the new admin (I picked Administrator) and put their DN in this field. In my case, this is CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=Domain,DC=com. If you aren't sure of your DN, browse to your user in ADSIEDIT and you can directly copy/paste the DistinguishedName from your user object into this field.

Once done, no service restarts needed, as the uninstaller is just checking these fields.. You can now select Remove for Exchange 2003!

Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer out of beta!

More info at the MS exchange team blog!

Shawn and Brad work hard everyday on the RCA tool, taking input from Exchange administrators, consultants, and the product development and support teams to build a tool that will help anyone work through Exchange connectivity issues. Great tool, great guys, and they are really responsive. The newest updates (specifically the CAPTCHA) is a big win for everyone!

https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

I also really like the ability to manually specify server settings. Great work guys!

Using ADModify to ensure inheritable permissions are set on user objects

Most Exchange migrations I might find 1-2 of these that can be addressed as one off issues, but today I had customer that had a lot more than usual.

I searched for a good adsiedit, ldp, or other query - no good, its an ACL, not an AD user object property, I did find some .NET examples that I did not want to venture down that road.

And then, I found admondify.net:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996216(EXCHG.65).aspx

This requires a PSS call (or google) to download. Not an install, just an unzip and use utility.

Click Modify Attributes

Select domain, select a DC, Hit the big green arrow

Then select the root or OU you want and enter a custom LDAP query of (objectClass=*) and select add to list

Then Ctrl-a or control select user objects and hit next.

Then you can go to the account tab (normally would be security->advanced in ADUC) and finally select the "allow inheritable permissions to propagate to this object" checkbox and go.

Quick, easy, and best of all, whatever you do generates an XML log file that you can also use to "undo" your changes!