Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Blog
Introduction The DAG (Database Availability Group) makes it easy for administrators to ensure high availability for the mailbox servers. Spanning a DAG with several databases across several servers is quite simple. But what about the other Exchange Server roles? If there are highly available mailbox servers, but due to a defect the only CAS server in the ... Read more
Microsoft has published the architecture poster for Exchange Server 2010. For all those interested, the poster is available for download at the link below: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=cea0cf7e-d824-49bb-8924-39d66a5fb88e PS: For Exchange 2007, the architecture poster is available at the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=FDCDF6E5-DE47-4B58-8086-282101BCDDE9&displaylang=en
The Best Practice Analyzer issues a warning if not all organizational units (OUs) of the organization are protected against accidental deletion. If you do not want to do the work of clicking on all OUs individually and activating the protection, you can let Powershell do the work for you. We first import the Active Directory module into the Powershell: ... Read more
When installing Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010 on Server 2008 R2, errors may occur when checking the prerequisites. Setup reports that some patches are not installed. Here is the detailed list: Client Access Role Prerequisites Error Error: Install the hotfix from Microsoft Knowledge Base article 982867 at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB982867. Click here to view the ... Read more
Anyone installing a new DC should synchronize it with an external time source. It is advisable to use a time server on the Internet. The following instructions synchronize the DC with the NTP server of the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig. Simply copy the text into a text file and save it with the extension .REG, then execute this file and ... Read more
It has been possible to change passwords via OWA for some time now. What is new, however, is the possibility to change expired passwords via OWA. The prerequisite for this is Exchange 2010 with Service Pack 1 or Exchange 2007 with Service Pack 3 on Server 2008. To be able to use the new feature, a DWord (32Bit) ... Read more
If the setup of Exchange Server 2007 reports that no Global Catalog Server is available at the site, this is usually due to the following reasons: There really is no Global Catalog available at the site. Solution: Assign the Global Catalog to an existing DC or provide a new DC The DC at the site is a Windows Server 2008 and the domain functional level ... Read more
If you often have to deal with replication problems in your Active Directory, you should switch on "Strict Replication Consistency". In the event of replication problems between 2 or more DCs, the following scenario could arise: An AD object is deleted on DC1, but due to replication problems the change cannot be replicated from DC1 to DC2. If the replication problems last longer in this case ... Read more
To get a quick overview of the size of the mailboxes on the Exchange servers, the following command helps: Get-MailboxStatistics -server | sort TotalItemSize | FT DisplayName,TotalItemSize The command displays the name and size of the mailboxes, all clearly laid out in a table.
By default, the maximum size for mailbox rules is 64 KB. If you have mailboxes with a large number of rules, you may reach this limit. Unfortunately, Outlook and Exchange do not complain if you exceed this size limit, the rules are simply no longer executed. However, it is possible to adjust the maximum size for mailbox rules. Here is a small ... Read more
