Dude where's my PFE?

On the road again, I just can't wait to get on the road again....

So I'm a PFE now, Premier Field Engineer. It's an interesting gig, sort of like running your own company within Microsoft. I'm doing Platforms now, instead of Exchange. Trying to keep the mind limber and all. So far I've been doing shadowing of other

Defeated by Unexpected Transaction Log File growth

Applies to Exchange 2003, concepts apply to 2007 as well. I've bumped into a few cases recently where the customer had unexpected transaction log file growth that caused the server to dismount a storage group due to lack of disk space. In this post I'll

How to get rid of 9646 events

Applies to Exchange 2003 Event Type: Error Event Source: MSExchangeIS Event Category: General Event ID: 9646 Description: Mapi session "/o=<org>/ou=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=<userName>" exceeded the maximum of 32 objects

Database Status Unknown in 2k7 EMC? This might be why....

Applies to Exchange 2007 So I ran into a case today that was pretty interesting. The symptoms were a fairly generic error in the app log: Event ID: 4001 Task Category: General Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: server name Description:

Repeating 623 version store error.

Applies to Exchange 2003 I had a case a couple weeks ago I thought I'd write about. What was happening is the Version Store would run out of memory and a 623 error would throw. Version Store buckets allocated would climb from 4 to over 2000 in less than

How to fix smashed schema in Exchange 2003

Dan and I and some other engineers wrote up a blog post you can find here on how to recover from a smashes schema scenario on your Exchange Servers. It's pretty succinct so I don't have anything to add to it, it's an interesting read though.

How to determine who is connecting to your server in cached mode.

Applies to: Exchange 2000/2003 This may seem like a basic thing to some people, but for those who don't know, here goes. This can be easily done by running Exmon, available here . So download Exmon and fire it up on your Exchange Server. Go to the By

Spoof your old dead Exchange Server

Ok, so if you have say, Citrix, or a standard image with Office pre-installed, then someone had to pick an Exchange server to point to for the Outlook profile creation wizard. So sometimes, in large organizations, teams don't necessarily speak to one

Version Store 624 events

Applies to Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007. So in Version Store 623 errors, Version Store gets 'clogged', if you will, and will fail to process transactions. 624 errors on the other hand, are caused by a lack of available virtual memory on

Avoiding Version Store problems in the enterprise environment

Applies to Exchange 2003 So one of the things that can go wrong with Exchange is that it can run out of something called Version Store. Version store is an in-memory list of changes made to the database. Nagesh Mahadev has an awesome post about Version

PTE depletion, handle leaks and You

Applies to: Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server, Windows 2003 32bit Server, Exchange 2000/2003 PTEs Ok, so one of the most overlooked resources we run into with performance and availability problems is the availability (or lack thereof) of Free Page Table