BlankMan's Blog: Microsoft Exchange

We need feedback please!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:54:59 GMT

At Tech-ed Africa we mentioned that were trying to raise a technical community. To this end we've started with

www.exchangeserver.co.za, however since this is a site FOR the community by the community, please take a moment to have a look at the forums and post what you think YOU would like to see on the site?

How fast is YOUR Outlook?

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:23:15 GMT

This has got to be one of the most subjective matters, ever - How fast/slow is Outlook performing. While researching another topic, I came across a blog post from the Exchange team which allows us to give our users guidance on how to structure their mailboxes and why. Check it out here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

This is an older article, however this article is also being referenced in the Exchange 2007 deployment guides. Remember that Exchange 2007 still uses the ESE engine, and as such a lot of what we've learnt over the years still applies.

In summary: Critical top level folders should have no more than 5000 items max. These include, Inbox, Sent Items, Calendar, Contacts. after this, create sublevel folders. If your mailbox is over 2GB's, switch off Cached mode, and try to limit the number of apps on your machine that use MAPI, search engines fall into this category as well.

Exchange 2007 Messaging Records Management can help lessen this load, but make sure you understand the implications around this topic. Messaging Record Management is a nice change from the old Mailbox Manager, however some features require Outlook 2007. Check it out here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123548.aspx

With enough memory, Exchange 2007 can reduce the number of read/write ratio's to 1 read for every 1 write. This directly affects things like sort speed, retrieval speed, folder rendering and changing views, etc. This makes a really good argument for examining your disk infrastructure and how your disks are arranged - RAID, stripe, JBOD, etc. Knowing that a lot of Exchange Mailbox servers at Microsoft use RAID 10 configurations, striping is SERIOUSLY back in fashion - if you can afford it!

SBS POP3 connector pain

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:44:19 GMT

I have recently had a number of run-in's with the SBS 2003 POP3 connector and the thing's it DOESN'T do properly, such as not duplicate mail incessantly or just plain drop mail addressed to BCC - blind carbon copy recipients.

With that in mind, I've looked at the options for a POP connector replacement which essentially boils down to

a) connecting to a catch-all or list of defined mailboxes

b) download the mail and in SBS's case, forward all downloaded mail to the local SMTP stack for delivery, or deposit downloaded mails into the Virtual SMTP pickup directory.

There are a vast number of options to choose from. A number of commercial solutions can be found on Msexchange.org, freeware or open source solutions are available as well, and are very well implemented. One of the largest pains that follows POP based mail is the lack of native SPAM filtering, dude to the POP connector bypassing IMF altogether. The POP connector uses CDO to deliver mail as opposed to submitting it to the SMTP stack for pickup, classification and routing.

I have found a really good, solid replacement for the POP connector in the form of Chimera Computing's free (you heard right) pop connector. you can find them here: http://www.chimera.co.nz/ . Their connector is functional and cheap if you need to license it - advanced functions need activation, however to troubleshoot POP their free connector is awesome!

When it comes to a POP connector with LOADS of ANTI spam features - checkout GFI. They're a bit light on pure POP functionality, however they're quite feature rich in terms of SPAM and Exchange 2003 anti SPAM feature integration.

Top support issues for the Exchange information store

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:20:29 GMT

Since we hit these so oten, I thought it would be cool to post this one, even if you've bumped into it allready:

Top support issues for the Exchange information store

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893083/en-us

Seeig this list crop up so often, it's nice to have a KB article to refer to that has most of them, especially if you see a EvenT ID 1018 at 3 in the morning ;)

Third-party antivirus or backup software contention

Exchange information store database reaches 16 GB limit

Exchange information store transaction log files are missing or are corrupted

Hardware problems cause Exchange information store file damage

Exchange information store performance issues

Restoring or repairing damaged Exchange information store database files

Exchange information store database transaction log drive full

Expired evaluation or trial versions of Microsoft Exchange Server

PowerGUI supports Exchange 2003

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:20:26 GMT

Yip, PowerGUI now supports Exchange 2003 - but then it always did ;)

My earlier posts talked about how to get data out of Exchange 2003 - well might as well see it in a usable format in a GUI that doesn't cost you anything. Here's another node I added - Get Services

Adding these is really simple - right click on the PowerGUI root - click add folder - Type in your filename, in this case Exchange 2003. Then right click on your folder name, add a script node and paste in your Powershell scripts. A little more on this in later posts.....

GUI on a cmdlet

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:35:46 GMT

If you even have the slightest interest in Powershell, then check out PowerGUI. PowerGUI is a REALLY nice extensible wrapper around Powershell. You can learn a lot from the script source that's included in the product and there's a TON of Exchange 2007 stuff that you can do from PowerGUI that's hard to do from the existing management tools, or only implemented in Powershell.

Best bit - it's free! Check out http://www.powergui.org/index.jspa for really nice forums and a free download. You may want to apply what you're learning about PowerShell and Exchange 2000/2003 and extend PowerGUI to suit your own admin needs.

Want a job?

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:04:33 GMT

The Exchange team have put up a new site trying to help people figure out if they'd like to work with them. Check out the site on

http://www.exchangeyourcareer.com/

The site is done with a LOT of humour and is certainly worth having a look ;)

Nic

How do I know which Exchange Services 2000/2003 are running with PowerShell ?

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:48:09 GMT

While were doing stuff with Exchange - how do we know which Exchange Services are running and what kind of state they're in?

Simple. Again were sticking to using WMI, connecting to the machine remotely and interrogating the service state. The basic command line is: get-wmiobject win32_service -ComputerName 2003server ,however that gives us every service available on the machine. Issuing the same machine with a filter to match service names that contain the word "msexchange" gives us the following command: get-wmiobject win32_service -ComputerName 2003server | Where-Object { $_.name -match "^msexchange." }

This looks better, but still not quite what were looking for. Since the output of the previous command returns as an object we can pipe it into the select-object cmdlet With a bit of formatting we now have:

get-wmiobject win32_service -ComputerName 2003server | Where-Object { $_.name -match "^msexchange." } | select-object displayname, state, status

Release Notes for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:15:35 GMT

Makes for rather interesting reading, grab a copy of it here:

Link to Release Notes for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 2

Spot the ability to deploy onto Windows 2008, for more have a look this post from the Exchange dev team:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/08/16/44670...

Doing more WMI stuff with PowerShell and "old" Exchange versions

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:57:31 GMT

I'm going to start off with by referring to an Exchange 2000 article called Automating Exchange 2000 Management with Windows Script Host, since it set's the scene quite nicely for WMI based management for Exchange 2000. Exchange 2000 introduced a set of new WMI classes, and Exchange 2003 introduced a few more. PoweShell is renowned as an Exchange 2007 tool, however here were going to learn to use it to manage just about anything that has a MWI provider, with Exchange 2000/3 as my focus for today.

To show off what PoweShell can do I'm going to contrast a PoweShell one-liner with the equivalent scripts taken from the Exchange 2000 article mentioned above.

get-wmiobject ExchangeServerState -Namespace "root\cimv2\applications\exchange" -ComputerName 2000server

HERE IS SOME SAMPLE vbscript TO DO THE SAME THING:

Sample 1 Using the ExchangeServerState WMI class

   1:' VBScript script listing all ExchangeServerState names and properties       
   2:' available with the WMI Exchange 2000 provider.  
   .: 
   9:Option Explicit 
  10: 
  11:Const cComputerName = "LocalHost" 
  12:Const cWMINameSpace = "root/cimv2/applications/exchange" 
  13:Const cWMIInstance  = "ExchangeServerState" 
  ..: 
  ..: 
  24:Set ExchangeServerList = _ 
                  GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!//" &  
  25:                       cComputerName & "/" & _ 
  26:                       cWMINameSpace).InstancesOf(cWMIInstance) 
  27: 
  28:For each ExchangeServer in ExchangeServerList 
  29:    WScript.Echo "---------------------------------------------" 
  30:    WScript.Echo "Name: " & ExchangeServer.Name 
  31:    WScript.Echo "DN: " & ExchangeServer.Dn 
  32:    WScript.Echo "GUID: " & ExchangeServer.Guid 
  33:    WScript.Echo "Version: " & ExchangeServer.Version 
  34:    WScript.Echo "GroupDN: " & ExchangeServer.GroupDN 
  35:    WScript.Echo "Unreachable: " & ExchangeServer.Unreachable 
  36: 
  37:    WScript.Echo "ServerMaintenance: " & ExchangeServer.ServerMaintenance 
  38: 
  39:    WScript.Echo "ServerStateString: " & ExchangeServer.ServerStateString 
  40:    WScript.Echo "ServerState: " & ExchangeServer.ServerState 
  41: 
  42:    WScript.Echo "QueuesStateString: " & ExchangeServer.QueuesStateString 
  43:    WScript.Echo "QueuesState: " & ExchangeServer.QueuesState 
  44: 
  45:    WScript.Echo "DisksStateString: " & ExchangeServer.DisksStateString 
  46:    WScript.Echo "DisksState: " & ExchangeServer.DisksState 
  47: 
  48:    WScript.Echo "MemoryStateString: " & ExchangeServer.MemoryStateString 
  49:    WScript.Echo "MemoryState: " & ExchangeServer.MemoryState 
  50: 
  51:    WScript.Echo "CPUStateString: " & ExchangeServer.CPUStateString 
  52:    WScript.Echo "CPUState: " & ExchangeServer.CPUState 
  53: 
  54:    WScript.Echo "ClusterStateString: " & _ 
                      ExchangeServer.ClusterStateString 
  55:    WScript.Echo "ClusterState: " & ExchangeServer.ClusterState 
  56: 
  57:    WScript.Echo "ServicesStateString: " & _ 
                      ExchangeServer.ServicesStateString 
  58:    WScript.Echo "ServicesState: " & ExchangeServer.ServicesState 
  59:Next 
  ..: 
  ..: 
  ..:

My PowerShell script connects to a machine called "2000Server". The VBScript sample connect to localhost. Adjust the names to suit your environment and run both. PowerShell has the advantage of auto rendering the object and displaying the objects properties when it returns. In VBScript, we need to know the objects properties in order to display them. I hope you're seeing that PowerShell is a pretty cool tool when it comes to Exchange 2000 and Excahnge 2003. In my next post, I'll be writing more on what else we can do with WMI and other things in Exchange 2000?

Linux-based VoIP phones support Exchange Server services

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:04:03 GMT

This popped into my email today. In the light of recent news I thought it really appropriate, Question is, would Microsoft endorse the phone if it ran SuSE?

Here's the link to the article

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7755736790.html