Exchange, a view from the trenches : Technical

Ever want to test your CAS deployment?

vytas — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:21:00 GMT

Have you ever, either in the course of troubleshooting, or perhaps when standing up a new Client Access Server, wanted a method to test if it works externally? Microsoft CSS has deployed a tool - more specifically, a web site- where you can check the functionality and availibility of any CAS servers that you may have published to the internet.

The Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer conducts the following tests of your CAS servers:

-autodiscover test
-validates your login creds
-tests RPC/HTTP
-tries hostname/autodiscover
-then autodiscover.domain.com
-connect over 443, check cert, rpc ping on different ports
-RPC/HTTP test
-Inbound SMTP test
-gets MX records
-validates MX records
-tests port 25
-sends email

Stay tuned, as this tool is in it's infancy
-OWA test- coming soon
-EAS test coming soon
-POP/IMAP coming soon

http://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com

Things I didn't know about Vista - New file system introduced with SP1

vytas — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:04:00 GMT

It’s always been a personal pet peeve that large USB drives come shipped from the factory formatted with FAT. I have to reformat my MP3 player semi-regularly because it is a 30 GB Fat (something) partition.

The first thing I do with a new USB flash drive is to try to format it with NTFS. Today, I noticed that there was a new file system choice: exFAT. In short, it is designed for mobile devices and USB flash drives, where using NTFS may not be possible. exFAT supports partitions beyond 32GB.

More info:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa914353.aspx

The unholy trio

vytas — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:13:00 GMT

Are you having weird issues with connectivity? Outlook clients not being able to connect to Exchange? RDP suddenly stops working? Perhaps one of the following:

• When you try to connect to the server by using a VPN connection, you receive the following error message:
Error 800: Unable to establish connection.
• You cannot create a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the server.
• You cannot connect to shares on the server from a computer on the local area network.
• You cannot join a client computer to the domain.
• You cannot connect to Microsoft Exchange Server from a computer that is running Microsoft Outlook.
• You can only connect to Web sites that are hosted on the server or on the Internet by using a secure sockets layer (SSL) connection. In this scenario, you cannot connect to a Web site that does not use SSL encryption.
• You experience slow network performance.
• You cannot create an outgoing FTP connection from the server.
• The DHCP Server service crashes.
• Clients experience slow domain logons.
• Network Address Translation (NAT) clients that are located behind Windows SBS 2003 experience intermittent connection failures.
• You experience intermittent RPC communications failures.
• Clients that are configured as SecureNat clients may be unable to connect to the Internet.
• Some Outlook clients may be unable to connect to Exchange.
• You cannot run the Configure E-mail and Internet Connection Wizard successfully.
• Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server blocks RPC communications.
• Clients cannot visit the http://companyweb Web site.
• You cannot browse Internet Information Services (IIS) Virtual Directories.

If you are seeing strange behaviors with networking, you ought to educate yourself and read the following:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;927168
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/07/18/446400.aspx
http://microsoft.com/snp

If any of that looks vaguely familar, you may want to consider disabling TCP Chimney, along with RSS (receive side scaling) and TCP Offloading.

As an addendum to this post, if you are having issues with CAS servers, IMAP/POP, and slow Autodiscover, you may also want to look at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943502 and apply http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942027/

Updating Schema for Exchange 2007 (easily understandable format)

vytas — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 07:47:00 GMT

**If you do not know what Schema is, or Exchange 2007 for that matter, do not attempt this. Put your keyboard down and back slowly away from the computer. This post is intended for qualified Exchange Admins only**

Recently, I had cause to go through the various ways of preparing your AD and AD schema for Exchange 2007.

I've broken this process down into two general scenarios, the first where you want to apply all pre-requisite AD and AD schema changes, and then the second where you may want to stage the AD and AD schema changes. I've then further broken down each of the 2 scenarios into 2 cases: single forest/single domain, and single forest/multiple domains. All scenarios assume you are transitioning* an existing Exchange Org to Exchange 2007 from 2003 or 2000. So, to summarize, this post will cover the following scenarios and cases:

"All at once"

-Single Forest, Single Domain

-Single Forest, Multiple Domains

"Staged"

-Single Forest, Single Domain

-Single Forest, Multiple Domains

Here are my notes on preparing schema:

All at once
Single domain, single forest
setup.exe /preparead (this is what the wizard/gui runs)

Single forest, multiple domains
setup.exe /preparead (or /ad)in root, then - Enterprise admin and schema admin
setup.exe /preparedomains (/pd)-or setup.exe /preparealldomains (/pad) - enterprise rights

Staged:
Single domain, single forest
setup.exe PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions (/pl) -Enterprise admin and schema admin
setup.exe /prepareschema (/ps) -Schema admin
setup.exe /preparead (/ad) - Domain Admin (unless domain created after preparead, then also needs exchange org admin rights)

Single forest, multiple domains
(ROOT)setup.exe PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions (/pl) -Enterprise admin and schema admin
(ROOT)setup.exe /prepareschema (/ps) -requires Schema admin
(ROOT)setup.exe /preparead (/ad) - requires Domain Admin (unless domain created after preparead, then also needs exchange org admin rights)

Then, in each child domain that is hosting:
-Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003, or Exchange 2007 servers
-Mail-enabled objects
-Global catalog servers that Exchange directory access components might use

Run the following:
-setup /preparedomain (/pd)

Reference:

White Paper: Description of the Parameters Used With the Exchange 2007 Setup.com Tool

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb288906.aspx