I’ll be down in Orlando at TechEd IT Pro next week. I’m working a booth of some fashion in the Technical Learning Center most of the week I’m told, so feel free to drop in and say hello if you’re in town as well. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!
The Microsoft error code lookup tool (which no Windows admin should be without) got updated today: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=be596899-7bb8-4208-b7fc-09e02a13696c&displaylang=en&tm. While it says it’s for Exchange, it really covers Exchange, Windows and a number of other Microsoft products. You can plug an error code in and this tool will give you whatever definitions it finds in the headers compiled into it. If you’ve ever seen an event that says “the error code is in the data”, or you get a message that “unknown error 0x80045500” has occurred and you have no idea what to do, this is where to start. I keep the … Continue reading Updated Error Code Lookup Tool
So I have an MCSE: Messaging 2003. Took something like 7 or 8 tests to get that way back when and it’s still good. Being the good consultant that I am I decided I’d figure out what I need to do to get whatever the new equivelants are on Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007: The new Windows 2008 exam seems to be an “MCITP: Enterprise Administrator”: Windows 2003 MCSE upgrade Test Windows Vista Test Windows 2008 Enterprise Administrator Test OK so, three tests total for an upgrade. That’s a lot of test questions, but, seeing as my transcript says I took … Continue reading Upgrading my MCSE
Apparently when installing a new Exchange 2007 SCC cluster, you can’t give the resource group containing the physical disks the same name as what the cluster virtual name will be. For example if your mailbox virtual server will accessible via shortname “vmbx01”, calling the cluster group “vmbx01” will result in setup failing with this error: Cluster Common Failure Exception: Cluster Common Failure Exception: The group or resource is not in the correct state to perform the requested operation. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007139F) Once I renamed my cluster group to “vmbx01-disk”, setup proceeded business-as-usual. After setup completes you need to migrate all … Continue reading Exchange 2007 SCC Install Error
A few months ago I came across this shareware utility called Anagram. It’s a plug-in for Outlook that parses textual contact and appointment information into a new contact or appointment object. I really only use it for contacts, but the basic scenario is take the common email signature tons of people have with their name, email, phone number, address, etc at the bottom of every email. Out of the box if you want to convert that to a new Outlook contact, you create a new contact and then you copy and paste each field one at a time. With Anagram, … Continue reading Very Cool Outlook Addin
A comment I received on a previous post on sites and subnets in Active Directory was “what benefit(s) does a dedicated Exchange site provide?”. There’s a couple things to consider here with the advent of Exchange 2007. The first is the great degree of dependency Exchange has on Active Directory data for everything it does. The second, applicable to Exchange 2007 deployments is that Exchange now uses the Active Directory site topology to route email. I’m not familiar enough with this scenario yet to speak to it, but I will speak to the need for fast and reliable global catalog … Continue reading Dedicated Exchange Sites in Active Directory
I was working on a customer’s Exchange server today when I got presented with a weird error in Exchange System Manager (ESM) while trying ot do some work on their public folder hierarchy. I was first getting this error: —————————Exchange System Manager————————— The operation failed because of an HTTP error 501 (Not implemented). Verify that the ExAdmin virtual root exists on the destination server. ID no: c1030af7 Exchange System Manager —————————OK————————— I traced this down to someone having applied IP address level restrictions to the various Exchange virtual directories (including exadmin and public) which prohibited me from connecting with ESM … Continue reading Exchange System Manager Public Folder Errors
Microsoft released a little addin for Outlook which you can use to forward junk mail not caught by the builtin filter to them for analysis (and hopefully improving the filter): "The Junk E-mail Reporting Tool submits e-mail to Microsoft when you explicitly choose to do so. If you receive a junk e-mail and want to report it to us for analysis, first select the e-mail in Outlook and then click the junk e-mail button on your tool bar. You will see a pop-up window asking whether you want to report the selected e-mail to Microsoft and its affiliates. When you … Continue reading Outlook Junk Mail Reporting Tool
October 2006 has 5 Sundays, and this leads to a bug in Exchange 2003 manifesting itself where user's meetings are moved a day ahead. The hotfix (and a bit of info) is available here. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!
Backup Exec (10.1 at least) has an annoying (and undocumented) bug when it comes to restoring to an Exchange 2003 Recovery Storage Group. When you go to restore a mail store to a recovery storage group, BE goes along for a couple minutes and then fails with error "V-79-57344-65280 – Unable to restore the selected Microsoft Exchange database 'MailStoreNameHere' because it is currently mounted. Use the Exchange System Manager to dismount it, and then retry the job.". The whole point of the recovery storage group is to restore user data without dismounting the production store, so this doesn't make a … Continue reading Backup Exec Exchange 2003 Bug Workaround
