Tag Archives: Exchange

Exchange 2003 to 2010

email,

While uninstalling Exchange 2003 I was getting the error “you cannot remove a server that is a target bridgehead for a routing group connector. This server is a target bridgehead for the following connections”.I deleted the connector on the Exchange 2003 server, but I still received the uninstall error. This post clued me in that I should be looking for something on the new Exchange 2010 server, and after performing a Remove-RoutingGroupConnectorin the Exchange console I was able to uninstall (though just be sure to have that Exchange 2003 ISO laying about).

Update:After only having the stat tracker running for two days on my site, this post has turned up as being disproportionately popular so I figured I’d post another note on my uninstall experience with this Exchange 2003 server: I ended up having to manually uninstall it in this case and then had to remove entries from active directory using ADSI edit that were subsequently causing errors on the new Exchange server.  I know the post I relied on over on Microsoft’s forum had follow-ups that said to absolutely not do that, but it was the only thing that worked.  Use at your own risk, of course.

I believe, if I remember correclty, that  the issue that led to this result was the fact that I just couldn’t remove the stores from the 2003 server.

When Upgrading Equals Lost Features

Uncategorized

I remember an old version of Exchange had the ILS service and upon ‘upgrading’ I noticed that the feature had been eliminated, and nothing much added to the package, apart from management headaches (“You want to flush the queues? Sorry!”). For SMBs, the highpoint of Microsoft Exchange was version 5.5, though the RPC over HTTP feature which was added in 2003 is a notable exception.  I never got a chance to really use ILS so I didn’t really miss it, but I thought the functionality was promising and it provided a nice feature beyond a generic IMAP/SMTP setup.

A little bit ago I upgraded our Exchange 2007 to 2010.  Although we got the upgrade ‘for free’ via SA, the main driver for the migration was so that I could allow an Apple Mac user to access file shares via OWA (Outlook Web Access/Application).  With such a nice feature it didn’t even occur to me that Microsoft would dump it, so when I read up and learned that A) OWA on Exchange 2007 only supports Premium OWA on Internet Explorer and B) Network file share access is only available under Premium OWA and C) Exchange 2010 supports all platforms/browsers under Premium OWA, ergo D) Upgrade Exchange to 2010 to allow my (important) Mac user to access file shares via Premium OWA.

But alas no; even though the Exchange 2010 console appears to support file share access, it has in fact been removed:

OWA removed features

I browsed the ‘”What’s new” for Exchange 2010, but unfortunately I don’t see anything in there that I can hang my hat on that makes it worthwhile to have spent a weekend upgrading it.  There’s the advantage that I’m now very early in the upgrade cycle so it will be some time before I have to upgrade again, but that’s just upgrading for the sake of upgrading (which is not without it’s appeal, but still…).

Exchange 2010 Upgrade Notes

email,

I’ve upgraded our Exchange 2007 setup to Exchange 2010 and two irksome issues cropped up that sponged up a great deal of my time:

  • First, when I was moving users (aka ‘local move’) in a remote domain from the Exchange 2007 server to the Exchange 2010 server I was receiving the ‘insuff_access_rights’ error and I was unable to move the mailbox*.  Eventually I did have to do the ’include inheritable permissions’ checkbox on most of the users, but since that didn’t work right away I investigated quite a bit more before finding that the permissions for various ‘Exchange’ entries at the root of the remote domain within active directory users and computers were “goofed”.  Things went more smoothly after setting the matching entries to (about) the same permissions as the ones at the host domain.
  • I couldn’t uninstall Exchange 2007 since it was hosting unremovable folders on the public folder database (‘Internet Newsgroups’, etc.).  I tried to do things the right way, but wound up resorting to the ADSI edit tip here.

*By the way, I liked the ‘cached move’ method in Exchange 2010, but why can I clear out the flags for successful moves in the GUI, but I have to resort to a painful command line method if it fails? (Which, it failed for me a lot while working on it).

Exchange 2007 Mailbox Size Limit Alerts

Coding, Server Support, ,

I’d grown spoiled with my MOM pack for Exchange 2003 since I was able to tweak it to alert me (the admin) when a user’s mailbox was being issued size limit warnings.  Several times I was able to catch users stuck with items tucked away out of their view, or the storage of large files that’s better suited to the file server.  After moving to Exchange 2007 though Microsoft removed the event log entry that I used to trigger the MOM condition.  My fix was to create a script that would run on the same schedule as the one used to issue mailbox size warnings.  After combing a variety of pages I came up with the following imperfect, but sufficient script:

function send-email($SmtpServer,$From,$To,$subject,$Body){
$smtp = new-object system.net.mail.smtpClient($SmtpServer)
$mail = new-object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage
$mail.From = $From
$mail.To.Add($To)
$mail.Subject = $subject
$mail.Body = $Body
#$mail.IsBodyHtml = $true
$smtp.Send($mail)
}

get-mailboxstatistics|out-file mstat.txt
get-childitem mstat.txt|select-string -pattern “Issue”|out-file results.txt
$File=get-childitem “results.txt”
$FileContent=get-content “results.txt”
[string]$formattedLength = $file.Length
if($file.Length -gt 5){
send-email email.server.com “server@example.com” “admin@example.com” “Mailbox size alert” $FileContent
}

I apologize for the lack of comments, but what I’m doing is snagging the stats, searching for the word ‘Issue’ to see if a warning or some such was issued, then checking the resulting file size of the search and if it’s oversized (i.e. actually contains something) it’s emailed off to the desired contact.

(UPDATE: this e-mail size alert works for Exchange 2010 as well)

(UPDATE 12/6/2013: this e-mail size alert does not work for Exchange 2013.  I’m working to brew up a solution.)

Find the Mailbox

Server Support, ,

I was getting two errors in the log along these lines on my Exchange 2007 server every thirty minutes:

Unable to update Mailbox SD in the DS. Mailbox Guid: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx. Error Code 0x80070005

I tried the items like this that instruct on how to find the troublesome mailbox (adfind, etc), but nothing would turn up.

At the same time I was looking up how to purge a disconnected mailbox* and I came across this page.  Putting two and two together, I put this line into the Exchange console:

Get-MailboxStatistics | where-object {$_.MailboxGuid -ne $null} | Select DisplayName,MailboxGUID

I was then able to hunt through the output to find the naughty GUIDs and reset the permissions.  Luckily our environment doesn’t have too many mailboxes so I was able to just eyeball it.  I’m sure that there’s a different way to craft the command so that it can just kick out the desired desired mailbox instead of a complete list, but it wasn’t worth the time to find that for our environment.

*Yet another item that was in the GUI of Exchange 2003 that you need obscure commands for in Exchange 2007.