When my wife used to get asked what I did for work she used to say she didn't know.  So, I had to explain it to her in the simplest terms I could.  "I keep large companies' email working for them."

My current title is Advisory Support Engineer for Exchange.  It has been that way for a while, but I hadn't changed the title on this blog until now, because, well...  Who cares?  But, sometimes people want to know what you do for a living and in my case the title changes pretty often but the job pretty much stays the same no matter how grandiose the goals of the people who change the title were.  (I always wonder who they are?)

My title used to be Alliance Support Engineer when I first got hired into this gig.  As far as I know that name really made no sense except Microsoft and the customer were forming an "alliance" to support the customer's environment.  This changed later to Alliance Support Consultant which was loosely integrated with the Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) folks.  That is why you may still see my name on many blog links as Gerod Serafin (MCS) even though I am not MCS any more.  At that time the "effort" was to try to get everyone under one "Services" umbrella by calling us all Consultants.

So what is my job?  Well, I used to be a contractor like many of you on the outside of Microsoft who supported Exchange.  I wanted to know more about it and how it worked and how to help the customers.  But I kept running out of books to read and there just weren't enough answers out there without going straight to the source.  So, when Microsoft offered me the chance to help their customers by learning more about the product, I jumped at it.  So now I have a set number of customers (like I did before I came to Microsoft) and they ask me questions, except this time the customer is getting not only me but the rest of Premier Support at their disposal for their question and or issues.  I know the customer's environment so they don't have to tell me much more than the name of the server that they are having a problem with.  I know how many servers they have in the Organization, how many Routing Groups, how many third party connectors, what anti-virus vendors they have, etc...  It really shortens the troubleshooting time, because I know the customer.  Also, when I hear about a problem that other customers are having that may be an issue that my customer may experience, I can ADVISE them as well.

So, now I am called an Advisory Support Engineer or ASE for short.  Titles mean little.  The job still is the same. 

I keep large companies' email running for them.  I just need to keep that in my head and I think I will be fine.

I don't know who started this list first, but it is useful for me.  I thought that I would put it out there for everyone to use.  I’ve added some versions that weren’t on it originally and made some corrections as well.  If you find that this list is wrong or out of date, let me know and I’ll update it.  The list is sorted by RTM date.

You've heard it before, but just in case...

This blog has been moved to http://blogs.technet.com/gerod_serafin/default.aspx.  The old link should still work as well as the RSS feeds.  My reasons for switching are:

1. Better search.
2. Ability for those who don't have RSS readers to get this in emails.  Just click on "Email" and you can subscribe to be emailed when this is updated.
3. More current blog platform.  (Community Server vs. .TEXT)
4. And I guess "TechNet" is a term that we are all more familiar with.

Now for the update:

Better information facilitates rapid failure detection, reduces time to resolution, and reduces management cost and complexity.  I've been asked a lot recently which monitoring tools to use with Exchange 2003.  It seems that everyone wants me to tell them the alternatives to MOM 2005.  If you want to do the research yourself, I ask you to look for the following things in the product:

1. End to end monitoring of Exchange 2003. (Message tracking, Front-End Monitoring, Service Monitoring, Mailbox Availability, Mail Flow Monitoring)
2. Baselining of server performance on a continual basis.
3. Repository for Knowledge that can be re-used.
4. Reports to visualize performance data, to understand usage trends, perform accurate load balancing, and manage system capacity.
5. Reduce the need for admins who do daily checklists in the morning, by emailing the results to team instead of relying on one person to check this.
6. Out of the box rules to monitor and preemptively send alerts about the performance, availability, and security for Exchange, AD, Hardware, and ADC.
7. Rules updated by the developers of the products being monitored.
8. Single interface for all monitoring: HP Insight Manager, Exchange, AD, ADC, etc.
9. Includes an Exchange “Best Practices Analyzer” (EXBPA) Management Pack.
10. Create scheduled reports to send management.

If your product doesn't do all of the above, then I guess technically you still have an alternative.  Unless you can do all of the above, then you are not really aware of what is going on in your environment.  This is not your old Exchange server any more.  Your Exchange environment does a lot more than it used to do.  If you asked me for a way to keeping your valuable thing (i.e. sports car, house, phone system) in good shape, would you want me to give you an alternative to the best solution?  Does monitoring your Exchange 2003 environment that keeps your business running any less important?  Do you really want the solution to be a product that is actually a hodge-podge of other products bought from multiple companies by a hardware vendor and then forced together and re-branded as a new and improved suite?  (Oh, and you will still have to configure it.)  If so, good luck with your alternative(s).  Just don't ask me how to configure it to do what MOM 2005 does, because it can't.

MOM 2005 does 1-10 and more, and a majority of this is straight out of the box.  I used to say: "I don't care if you have MOM 2005 or not, but just get something to monitor your Exchange 2003 deployment."  Now I realize that statement is false.  I do care.

If you are looking to roll out Windows Server 2003 SP1 on your Exchange servers and you are doing clustering on back-end servers, we have a hotfix that you will need to install.

From: 841561 "500 - Internal server error" error message when a user tries to access a clustered Exchange Server 2003 back-end server by using Outlook Web Access 

“This problem is caused by some of the security enhancements that are included with Windows Server 2003 SP1.
In this scenario, when a user tries to access a mailbox by using Outlook Web Access, HTTP requests into the clustering API by impersonating the logged-on user. However, there have been security changes in Windows Server 2003 SP1. The security restrictions for the APIs that perform remote registry access have been changed. Therefore, the logon attempt is not successful.” 

Right now, this is a hotfix that you need to call in to get.  If it becomes available for public download the link will be in the above article.  This hotfix requires that you have Exchange Server 2003 SP1.  Another article will be available to address the issue if you do not have Exchange Server 2003 SP1 installed.

As always… please test the hotfixes in your test lab before deploying to production servers.

When you are looking at event in eventvwr.exe (Event Viewer) in Windows 2003 you see at the bottom of every Event the following:

For more information, see Help and Support at:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp

Sometimes when you click on that link you get some good information back.  Sometimes…

Where is that information stored?  Can you get to it without having to open the Event Viewer?  Sure.

TechNet has an Events and Errors Message Center where you can choose a product that the error is associated with.  Exchange 2003 has one here:

Exchange Server 2003 Events and Errors

There you can enter the Source of the error and the Event ID.  For instance, Entering the source of MSExchangeIS and the Event ID 5000 (Shudder…) gives you a table that includes:

5000  Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service. - Erro...

Click on the Event ID 5000 to see the same thing you would if you did it from the Event Viewer.  Don’t forget to expand the Related Knowledge Base articles at the bottom.

Windows Server 2003 SP1 Support Tools.
Since we all use many of these support tools for Exchange, it is interesting to note that SP1 includes an update to many of the old tools we use, like:

LDP.exe
ADSIEdit.msc
NetDiag.exe
and others...

The supported operating system in Windows Server 2003, but it can be installed on Windows XP as well.
You can download them here:
Download SP1 Support Tools

Oh...  and of course SP1 is out as well.  Look for more information on how to deploy the SCW and more with Exchange from the people at "You Had Me At EHLO..."  I got word in advance that they sould be writing about it, so keep an eye out for it.