I’ve been very busy lately lots of work, especially with Office 365 Hybrid deployments, Office 365 is really a growing demand and presents new technical perspectives which comes down to know knowledge

Well yeah I am a geek that likes to keep learning new stuff…

Long story short, you have deployed your Hybrid Office 365 topology to your current Exchange 2003, 2007 or 2010 organization and now you move a mailbox enabled user to the cloud (25 GB mailboxes rocks) , everyone is happy, then the CEO sends a “Happy New Year” email to “All Company” DL and for some reason the user which was moved to the cloud did not receive that memo….

So what happened ?

Most “All Company” distribution lists are Dynamic Distribution Groups AKA Query Based Distribution Group , and as such they have a LDAP filter which populates the members auto-magically – most members are Users with Exchange Mailbox, but you’ve missed is that when you move a user mailbox to Office 365 the original user was transformed to Mail-Enabled user – With an external address !

Yeah, you will need to modify those groups now to have “Users with External e-mail addresses” also checked

Problem solved – Happy new year !

ilantz

Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 is here !
I will do my best to show off some new features soon enough…

Great stuff coming with Exchange 2010 SP2, along with features already mentioned at the Exchange Team Blog – Announcing Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 , a major schema update will support some new stuff.

Quoting Michal smith’s blog, here’s some key points to mention:

1. The Mail-Recipient class has now gained the Company and Department attributes.

   This means that Groups (both security groups and distribution groups) and Contacts (mail contacts) can now be assigned values to the Company and Department attributes.

   From a technical perspective, the Mail-Recipient class is a system auxiliary class, for both the Group and Contact classes, and all attributes present in Mail-Recipient are available in them.

2. The ms-Exch-Custom-Attributes class has gained 35 new custom attributes, from ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute-16 to ms-Exch-Extension-Attribute-45, and ms-Exch-Extension-Custom-Attribute-1 through ms-Exch-Extension-Custom-Attribute-5.

   This means that Contacts, Groups, Users, Public Folders, Dynamic Distribution Lists, and Recipient Policies all now have a huge number of new attributes that can be assigned arbitrary values by an organization. This is welcome news to organizations who are using many or most of the current custom attributes and are wary to extend the schema themselves.

   From a technical perspective, the ms-Exch-Custom-Attributes class is an auxiliary class for all the named classes above.

3. Many new attributes and classes were added to provide support for Address Book Policies and to enhance access to various address lists, global address lists, and offline address lists maintained by Exchange.

   The master class is ms-Exch-Address-Book-Mailbox-Policy.

4. There are several new attributes and one new class (ms-Exch-Coexistence-Relationship) that are probably designed to support the Hybrid Coexistence Wizard and to overall simplify the process of configuring hybrid coexistence with Exchange Online.
5. There is a new class (ms-Exch-ActiveSync-Device-Autoblock-Threshold) and a number of new attributes that are within that class that appear to be designed to support automatic throttling of ActiveSync devices.

Read on: A Somewhat Detailed Look at Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 Schema Changes

Have a great weekend!

ilantz

I often get calls and questions regarding backups and Exchange Server, since ever this issue is not always working as required or as you would expect, but that’s off-topic

One of the most common stories is that without a a working Exchange Server backup or for another example you perform massive mailbox moves, transaction logs will get piled and fill up the volume or disk that they reside in. and then panic starts, “hey my databases where dismounted…” then of course the administrator realizes that the space of the log drive or volume has indeed ran out and now he needs to figure out what to delete.. and here’s where this post comes in…

So how can you delete or purge Exchange server logs without any risk ? well, in simple – you cannot, because the whole idea of restoring an Exchange or for this matter any transactional database requires you to have a first – “full” backup of the database itself and all transaction logs that were generated since the the date of the database creation date, or the last “successful” “full backup”.

Now here’s a nice method to “fake” a “full backup” or an on-demand transaction logs purge when you see you will be soon out of space, using the Exchange VSS writers and the diskshadow utility (available with Server 2008 or 2008 R2) . This procedure also “proves” that a VSS backup for your Exchange Server will work fine.

note: This method was tested on an Exchange server with Locally Attached Disks, not storage attached LUNs.

Use this method on on your risk. You should preform a “Full Backup” right after this process is done.

This example will show you how to purge the logs for a database that is located on Drive D. we will “fake backup” drive D and this will trigger the logs to be purged.

1. Open Command prompt
2. Launch Diskshadow
1. Add volume d:
2. Begin Backup
3. Create
4. End Backup
3. At this step you should notice the following events in the application log indicating that the backup was indeed successful and logs will now be deleted.

Here’s some screenshots from the process:

The Diskshadow example screenshot.

ESE – Event ID 2005 – Starting a Full Shadow Copy Backup

MSexchangeIS – Exchange VSS Writer preparation.

ESE Event ID 224 – Logs are now purged

MSExchangeIS Event ID 9780 – Backup is now complete.

side note: although this example was tested against Exchange 2010, it should work just as fine with Exchange 2007.

Hope this helps you !

ilantz

Since the first migrations of Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 we’ve seen a really annoying error within Outlook 2003, 2007 and Outlook 2010 when trying to De-commission  legacy servers, specifically when moving all public folders replicas including the EFORMS REGISTRY system folder and it’s children folders. once the organizational forms ( respectively you might see a different folder name within your organizatino ) is replicated only to the Exchange 2010 – a log / error message will be created in the Sync Issues upon an Outlook Send/Receive operation:

11:56:54 Synchronizing Forms
11:56:54 Downloading from server ‘public folder server‘
11:56:54 Error synchronizing folder
11:56:54 [80004005-501-4B9-560]
11:56:54 The client operation failed.
11:56:54 Microsoft Exchange Information Store

Notice: Use this method at your own risk ! This method is for organizations that do not use Forms !

Many posts and different resolutions were recommended, my original “fix” for this issue was to not replicate the organizational forms folder to the new Exchange 2010 public folder when starting to De-commission the Exchange 2003 server, practically “leaving it behind”.

I recently handled a situation where the Exchange 2003 server was already removed, and the forms folder was already replicated to Exchange 2010, and the error was already in place. I could not use Exchange 2003 System Manager to remove the replica, Exchange Management Shell or EXFolders. You cannot really leave an empty replica list within the tools.

MFCMapi to the rescue

1. Open MFCMapi, click the session menu, select the logon and display store table option.
2. Double click public folders, expend the public root tree, expend NON_IPM_SUBTREE, expand EFORMS REGISTRY.
3. Locate and select the organizational forms folder.
4. Scroll the property list to find the PR_REPLICA_LIST entry – double click it and clear the value inside – clear means delete the values inside the property. Setting PR_REPLICA_LIST to NULL actually leaves us with an empty replica list – which “solves” this issue.
5. Note that when you click to apply the change of the PR_REPLICA_LIST the property list will immediately shrink, this is normal
6. Exit Outlook, wait and see that indeed the Sync Issues folder does not include a new log with the 80004005-501-4B9-560 error.

Use this method at your own risk ! and again – this method is for organizations that do not use Forms !

Some references for you usage:

Troubleshooting: Error synchronizing folder Synchronizing Forms 80004005-501-4B9-560

Outlook synchronization error [80004005-501-4B9-560] with a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 mailbox

“80004005-501-4B9-560″ synchronization error logs are generated in the Sync Issues folder in Outlook in a Business Productivity Online Suite Dedicated environment 

I tend to always spend some time looking up the latest Office / Outlook updates, and found this following link from the office center on TechNet to be much useful.

It has a nice table of the latest Service Pack, Latest Public Update and Latest Cumulative Update for Office 2003 / Office 2007 / Office 2010

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee748587 – Update Center.

Enjoy !

You’ve missed a change Exchange 2010 SP1 introduced two new settings for Set-MailboxServer related to the Calendar Repair Assistant:

-CalendarRepairWorkCycle and -CalendarRepairWorkCycleCheckpoint
These parameters work together. The CalendarRepairWorkCycle parameter specifies the time span in which all mailboxes on the specified server will be scanned by the CRA. For example, if you specify seven days for this parameter, the CRA will process all mailboxes on this server every seven days. Calendars that have inconsistencies will be flagged and repaired according to the interval specified by the CalendarRepairWorkCycleCheckpoint parameter. For example, if you specify one day for this parameter, the CRA will query every day for new mailboxes that require processing.

To have you exchange server schedule a daily repair schedule at 23:00 PM, while making sure this task runs each day (Cycle), and searches for new mailboxes to process every 12 hours (CycleCheckpoint) run the following:

Set-MailboxServer -Identity MBX2 -CalendarRepairSchedule 1.22:00-1.23:00, 2.22:00-2.23:00, 3.22:00-3.23:00, 4.22:00-4.23:00, 5.22:00-5.23:00, 6.22:00-6.23:00, 7.22:00-7.23:00  -CalendarRepairWorkCycle 1.00:00:00 -CalendarRepairWorkCycleCheckpoint 12:00:00

Now it will actually run

Enjoy !

Just got promoted

http://www.forefrontsecurity.org/Home/MVPExpertZone.aspx

http://forums.forefrontsecurity.org/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2458#post245

Wanted to share with you a situation I’ve encountered with Exchange 2010 SP1.

The subject mail system suffered from an extensive downtime. The mailbox server role had it’s databases unavailable due to a storage outage, but as any major mail system – SMTP does not just “stop”.. and after a long 24+ hours of downtime, there were quite a few messages that were waiting to be delivered to the system’s recipients… counted ruffly around 5000+

Once the storage system issue was solved, and the mailbox databases were back up, the queue viewer showed that all 20 databases had around 100+ messages to deliver, which triggered the Exchange 2010 SP1 Store Driver throttling, more “verbose” information was also found at the Hub Transport connectivity log @ \TransportRoles\Logs\Connectivity directory showing the exact error is:

432-4.3.2 STOREDRV; mailbox server is too busy

In a few words, throttling makes sure that a single client or a “specific issue” could effect the whole mail system, and it works in several aspects with Exchange 2010, some might be client, protocol and server role throttling.

In our case, the Mailbox Store engine throttling was triggered due the overwhelming messages per seconds, per recipient and the connection the hub transport servers was issuing to the mailbox server role.

Now, we could have “accept” this by-design behavior, but once the service was backup, it’s expected to have all queues zeroed-out, that is “where’s all the emails from today??!”

So, the goal was – let’s turn the throttling off , in regards to the Hub Transport <> Mailbox Server connections and once all queues are empty we will turn it on, sounds logical ? well, after quite a few searches I’ve noticed that the documentation is missing…

The Hub Transport throttling ( advanced ) settings are controlled in the throttling configuration on the edgetransport.exe.config file under the \Bin directory, but the setting to disable the throttling all together is nowhere to be found.. the only references found were:
<add key="RecipientThreadLimit" value="2" />
<add key="MaxMailboxDeliveryPerMdbConnections" value="3" />

even setting these values to ridicules numbers did not help, we still had 100+ messages waiting at each database delivery queue.

Only after a more furious search I’ve stumbled upon the following “hidden” magic setting:
<add key="MailboxDeliveryThrottlingEnabled" value="False" />

Restarted the Hub Transport service, waited a few seconds and… here’s the result:

Of course, once all queues were zeroed-out, took around 5 minutes, I’ve enabled throttling to the original value “True” and restarted the Hub Transport services again.

Hope this helps you out!

Links for the enthusiasts:

Exchange 2010 SP1 Store Driver throttling – Tony Redmond’s blog

Understanding Message Throttling – Technet

Understanding the EdgeTransport.exe.Config File – Technet

These are obviously great news for all cluster / shared-storage-in-need people like me read all about it at Jose Barreto’s Blog post:

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2 available for public download

More quick links:

• Configuring the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target
• Step-by-step: Using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target with Hyper-V (Standalone, Full, VHD)
• PowerShell cmdlets for the Microsoft iSCSI Target 3.3 (included in Windows Storage Server 2008 R2)
• Using PowerShell and the the iSCSI Target 3.3 WMI classes to create a differencing VHD for OS boot
• New white paper: Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Architecture and Deployment

Enjoy !!