BlankMan's Blog

I like free

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:57:14 GMT

It's been a good week for free. VMWARE giving things away, and so are Simple Talk. Simple Talk are giving away a copy of an E-book that's actually useful. If you know something or nothing about Exchange, it's worth having a read, especially since it's free.

The book is a collection of chapters from five books, here's a list of the chapters you get for free.

Exchange Server Architecture
Applying Planning Principles to Exchange Sever 2007
Exchange Server Administration
Installing Exchange Server 2007
Scaling Upward and Outward
Sizing Storage Groups and Databases
Defining Policies and Security Procedures
Planning a Backup and Recovery Solution for Exchange Server 2007
Planning Exchange Server 2007 Security
Creating, Managing Highly Available Exchange Server Solutions

If this can help you in any way at all grab it here

Outlook Anywhere on Exchange 2007/Windows 2008

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:30:22 GMT

Doesn't work really well out of the box. Why ?

See if you can spot the mistake between these two pictures. One of them is a picture of the IPV4 stack listening and the next one shows the IPV6 stack listening. If you've installed the RPC over HTTP proxy and enabled Outlook Anywhere on your CAS on Windows 2008, issue a Netstat -a -n and you' see the 6001, 6002, 6004 ports are listening on IPv4 but not IPv6

I found a terrific write up on this here on Aaron Marks blog. In a nutshell, you're looking to do a host file edit and add your machine name and IPv4 address, plus disable IPV6 in the registry and reboot. Well done again Aaron!

The Quick Guide to installing Exchange 2007SP1 with prerequisites on Windows 2008

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:07:35 GMT

This presumes were running Windows 2008 x64 and Exchange 2007 SP1 and we want to get all 4 roles installed onto the Windows 2008 server but you have NO CLUE where to start. While it may be scary doing this from the command line, you'll see that things are not as scary as you may think.

Ideally you are NOT going to be installing on a domain controller if you can possibly help it!

I'm not going to cover configuring Exchange 2007, merely how to install it and required prerequisites onto Windows 2008.

In a nutshell, we would want to install all roles on one machine, a typical small business scenario.

I also presume that you may be running Rpc over HTTP. If not, then ignore the last pre-requisite install below.

Once your Win2k8 box is built, and joined to the domain, open up a CMD promt (Start, Run, CMD, Enter)

and run the following commands in sequence, rebooting where necessary:

ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS
[Reboot after this step]
ServerManagerCmd -i PowerShell
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Digest-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression
ServerManagerCmd -i RPC-over-HTTP-proxy
[ignore if your not going to use]

This should look something like this:

When you're finished installing these, fire up the Exchange installer. You'll notice that the pre-req checks pass with flying colours with one exception, which is to be expected if this is your first Exchange server in the org. You may safely ignore this error and continue.

Don't reboot at this stage.

When you return to the installer, click on Step five to get critical updates. Follow the prompts to configure windows update for your machine. View the list of updates and install any which are listed as important

When everything's finished installing, go ahead and reboot.

VMware to release ESX 3i for free next week

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:31:10 GMT

Caught this on Hypervoria today

Why is this a good move ? ;)

It's going to make both Microsoft and VMWARE Hypervisor better with competition hotting up in the market.

With both companies releasing virtualization products to the rest of us that make our life easier, why wouldn't I be smiling!

SIPPROXY_E_CONNECTION_EXTERNAL_INTERNET_ACCESS_DISABLED

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:23:34 GMT

What a cool title, eh? I don't think so either, but this is an example of one of the many errors the OCS edge server may throw for the simple fact that the back end OCS server's services are in fact stopped.

I was working debugging external Web conferencing issues for a customer when overnight external Communicator access stopped. Telnet to port 443 revealed the port was open and listening. Checking the user in AD Users&Computers revealed the user was enabled, and so was external access on the edge server. The edge server confirmed services were up. Tracing gave me the cool error message which is the title of this post.

On a hunch I checked if the back end services were started, but they weren't. Problem solved, this time around however this error can pop up for a host of issues, including some not so obvious ones like services not being started......

Other authentication issues can creep up when the back end is configured to use TLS instead of MTLS. This will break the encrypted comms between the edge and the back end, however tracing will also reveal authentication errors.

OCS Reverse Proxy - How do I now it's working ?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:02:50 GMT

According to the OCS deployment docs, you need a reverse proxy of some kind in order to publish out meeting related content, like your slides, documents, whiteboard contents, etc. It doesn't matter if you use ISA (preferred) or anything else(Apache, etc) to publish this out, but how do you know your reverse proxy's working ?

a) You could stop and start a load of meetings with whiteboard content

b) you could browse to https://reverseproxyurl.yourdomain.com/etc/place/null/slidefiles/blank.png and if your browser shows a nice empty page with certificate locks in place - it's working. You may want to close down your browser between retry attempts. I also like to test with IE and Firefox to make sure everything works for most people.

HyperVoria.com

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:50:53 GMT

Steven Bink of Bink.nu launched HyperVoria about three days ago. It contains news, article and blog post from all over the net on Hyper-V.

Quoting the original post:

So if you are planning, piloting or deploying Hyper-V, please visit to http://HyperVoria.com, have a look around and join the first Hyper-V community, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed: http://feeds.hypervoria.com/hypervoria

OST performance slow? Defrag it

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:10:40 GMT

One of the frustrating realities about OST files is that they become progressively slower as they become older. One of the factors influencing this is fragmentation. You may argue that your defrag utility SHOULD do this for you, but how do you know for sure?

I'm going to use Contig.exe from Sysinternals to reveal all. I'm going to navigate to my Outlook application directory in my Vista profile and run

contig -a

to show me the number of fragments each ost file is in. I have several Outlook profiles and therefore several ost files.

You can see below that outlook4.ost is in 125 fragments!

The next step is to defrag all OST files. I'm going to do all of the ost files all at once in the current directory by running

contig *.ost.

The net effect after defragmentation is a maximum of 2 fragments in each file. Running

contig *.ost

again reveals that the files are as defragmented as contig.exe can with the following message :

"All files were either already defragmented or unable to be defragmented."

In summary, if your ost is running slow and you've looked at the other performance indicators that I've blogged about already, try defragging your OST file reguarly. If nothing else, you now know how to report on the level of fragmentation of your ost files.

Spaces email lagging

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:18:21 GMT

I JUST received notification of a spaces Message that arrived on the 27'th of JUNE. Today is the 4'th of JULY.

Mail stuck in a queue somewhere? <GRIN>

Office Communicator 2007 Solution Center

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:46:19 GMT

I didn't know this existed until I stumbled across it. A load of issues are documented and grouped by "How To" or "Troubleshooting"

You can find it here: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/11402

OCS/Communicator - Cannot Synchronize Address Book

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:38:03 GMT

When I opened Communicator I received a "Cannot Synchronize Address Book" message with additional detail of "Cannot synchronize with the corporate address book. The cause of the problem is unknown. Please contact your system administrator with this information."

I had this issue occur internally, i.e. on a local LAN/WAN and not from the Internet, and it turned out the IIS Virtual server for one of the address book nodes was mangled, i.e. returning unpredictable results. This was on a OCS Standard implementation.

When I browsed to the ABS node in IIS and clicked on Files, what I saw made sense. A list of address book files. When I opened up EXT\Files I saw the same thing. When I open up INT\Files, I saw garbage. I deleted the files directory and recreated it by pointing it to the same location that ABS\EXT\files was pointing to making sure the security was the same as the other two dirs. I repointed the abs\int\files dir to point to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Web Components\Address Book Files\Files

Start, Run, IISreset /noforce and signing out and in to Communicator showed the address book was now accessible again.

Exchange 2007 and Large Mailboxes

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:38:56 GMT

So what's large ?

In My Mind a large mailbox is anything to impractical for an OST, so anywhere above the 2GB mark, depending on hardware. The slower the hard drive - the smaller the OST becomes.

Microsoft published a new white paper Planning for Large Mailboxes with Exchange 2007, and it's an interesting read. The conclusion reads thus:

By deploying large mailboxes with Exchange in your organization and leveraging the high availability fast recovery features of CCR and the automated mailbox management features of MRM, you will enjoy significant improvements in knowledge worker productivity and service availability, at a lower cost per mailbox with improved end-user satisfaction and reduced administrative overhead.

While I mostly agree with the methodology employed in the white paper - disk to disk backups using DPM or something else, the use of CCR, etc,etc no real guidance or methodology is given in terms of best practice. Every IT shop I know runs mailboxes well over the 4GB mark, some in excess of 15GB. Since I'm not the customer paying for the hardware or deciding corporate email policies, it's a moot point to argue that mailboxes should be smaller, since every customer of mine wants to keep all of their mail all of the time. (I'm going to ignore Mail archiving here for a sec)

Where does this leave you - the administrator/owner/IT Pro - etc? If you're running large mailboxes, and large DB's you need to plan for backup and recovery first and foremost. D2D backup becomes a no brainer, and so does some level of replication. DPM is nice here since it Microsoft Backup backing Microsoft Exchange. However, if you're a small shop on a tight budget and worry about restore times, your options are much broader than they were with previous versions of Exchange. No matter your size, planning and testing is going to find the best fit. If you're a small shop, you may want to look at the DPM appliances produced by a number of vendors.

Assuming you're a small shop and you backup up onto tape, then 1/7th incremental backups will buy you a lot, however once your incremental backup times start approaching the length of your backup windows, then the business needs to invest in some kind of disk to disk to tape solution or face a potential disaster.

In conclusion

If you're about to upgrade or move to Exchange 2007 SP1 and have budget for redundancy, then large mailboxes are a real option, as long as you've tried and tested each feature you're about to deploy before you make a promise sign off that SLA to the business. With OST's still in the mix for mobile and/or remote or WAN based users, managing mailbox sizes isn't going to go away in a hurry. Exchange 2007 SP1 with clustering and D2D backup allow for large databases and good recovery times, however, when how does the cost of keeping all the the mail available outweigh the benefit of keeping it available? If you're the IT guy, that thankfully is a question the business needs to answer. If You're the business owner and the IT guy - you have a headache.

Exchange 2007 SP1 High Availability

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:00:28 GMT

So you want to eliminate a single point of failure - where do you start?

Let's assume you have anything upwards of 100 users. You would like mail flow, OWA, Active Sync and Outlook to carry on working - what's the minimum hardware requirement ?

4 Servers. No matter if you have 100 or 2000 users, the minimum stays roughly the same. The servers specs would change however. With this in mind and our 100 users, lets explain why 4 servers.

With the advent of Exchange 2007 SP1 comes CCR - Cluster Continuous Replication - as far as I'm concerned - the best thing since sliced bread with butter! Minimum spec for better than sliced bread - three machines.

Two mailbox roles, and one other - preferably a hub transport server. However we did say we needed redundancy, so throw in another machine in case the first HT (Hub Transport) dies, and we have 4 servers.

What about CAS ? CAS can happily co-exist on a HT AND both HT and CAS support NLB. HT doesn't need NLB for mail transport, however if you have internal customers submitting mail via SMTP then NLB is rather nice.

So in summary - minimum requirement for any kind of redundancy - two times mailbox plus two times HT/CAS combos = 4 servers.

Forgot to specify your reverse proxy during OCS setup?

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:55:42 GMT

If you forgot to do this during setup, or you just plain didn't know what the external name was going to be and now addressbook lookups don't work from the outside, there is hope!

LCSCMD to the rescue. You may find this under

\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\

The command line for changing or updating the reverse proxy FQDN is:

Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:externalreverseproxyurl /poolname:yourpoolname

where externalreverseproxyurl should be in the form of external.contoso.com and yourpoolname  is the

name of the OCS standard server or internal poolname of your OCS enterprise deployment.

Designing Your Perimeter Network for Office Communications Server 2007 White Paper

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:46:37 GMT

Microsoft Released this two days ago, and it fills the gap between the Edge Deployment document and real world deployment questions.

Some of the topics covered include:

Commonly Asked Questions

Architecture and Networking Best Practices

How to Set Up Load Balancers

How to Set Up a Firewall

Summary of Best Practices

A lot of this info has previously only been available via forums and/or newsgroups. Nice to see this formalised and released as guidance.

Grab it here

HYPER-V is here

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:38:01 GMT

Hurray, Hyper-V is out. I'm going to be posting something on Hyper-V and Exchange 2007-SP1 pretty soon, however, in the meantime, it's out, go play with it NOW! BTW, this will not work with 2008 Beta, just in case you were wondering.

KB article 950050 is available here.

Grab the release notes here.

Download the x86 here and x64 here.

When Outlook Anywhere stops working

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:58:54 GMT

So where do you start looking when Outlook Anywhere HAS been working fine now stops? I had this case today on a Exchange 2007 server with Sp1 and Rollup 2 deployed. The remote outlook clients were receiving mail, but calendaring and GAL lookups failed. Turned out that the RPCPROXY key was mangled. Thanks to Riccardo Moretti for pointing me in the right direction.

The exact key location is HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\RpcProxy - ValidPorts

The value of ValidPorts had changed to an unexpected one. Trying to understand why I found some interesting articles here:

How does Outlook Anywhere work (and not work)-

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831051

Ultimately I fixed this by disabling Outlook Anywhere, Reinstalling RPC over HTTP, re-enabling Outlook Anywhere.

After that I monitored the ValidPorts key to make sure it was populated properly and restarted Exchange Services after ensuring the RIGHT values had populated.

I'll try figure out why the key value changed in the first place and update when I know.

twittering

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:14:02 GMT

Twitter on my blackberry - twitterberry, in my outlook, on my msn, on my Klipfolio, and it only took a few minutes to get sucked in.............

I'm twittering. Now to find the coolest twitter windows app.....

Microsoft Exchange Server Error Code Look-up utility revised

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:28:17 GMT

Microsoft Exchange Server Error Code Look-up has been updated at the end of May. This tool is invaluable when it comes to knowing that a error 0x8000504 means something in plain English.

I STRONGLY suggest you download this one and keep it handy. You may find it here :

https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=be596899-7bb8-4208-b7fc-09e02a13696c&displaylang=en&tm

Happy hunting!

I have a new Toy - a Blackberry 8800

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:33:15 GMT

Yup - it's not a Windows phone - it's a Blackberry - Why ?

Battery life with good follow-me email support. The Blackberry service knows how to suck mail out of OWA and push it to my phone - while it's not the rich phone experience I'm used to on the Windows Phone platform, it's got better battery life than any smart Phone I've had in recent years, and I've got the stuff I need - Email, contacts, calendar - oh, and its a phone ;)

BTW - Media playback is awesome on this platform - I found a really cool tool to get my vids into a nice format - and it's work for any phone out there that'll play AVI's

http://www.seabyrdtech.com/bbdl

The promised GPS software with turn by turn guidance turned out to be Blackberry Maps, which are about as useful as any other mapping software - but not what was sold to me. I'll see if the service provider will change these for me.

Custom List: Site's I contribute to

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:22:31 GMT

Site's I contribute to

Custom List: Websites that I like

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:22:02 GMT

Websites that I like

User Friendly
Catoon helpdesk set at an ISP which sometimes comes very close to real life
BINK
Microsoft and related news
Messaging Talk
Portal for all things Messaging
Outlook Exchange
Exchange management, Outlook, AD, MIIS and how they relate to Exchange
You Had Me At EHLO
Microsoft Exchange Team Blog