Enterprise Vault - Failed Exchange Task

Here's another weird one.
Enterprise Vault, we use this for e-mail archiving. It does a reasonable job. Probably no better or worse than any similar product.

A couple of days ago I noticed that there was warning that it hadn't archived anything from one of our mailbox servers for a couple of days, not big issue as there is just a couple mailboxes on there as it used for testing at the moment. I had a look at the associated task and it was stopped. Started it and it failed. Error in the event log looked something like below

The Task 'Exchange Mailbox Archiving Task for EXCH' failed to log on to Exchange server 'EXCH' using mailbox 'SMTP:EnterpriseVault@symantec.local'. Please ensure the mailbox has not been hidden, that the server is running and that the Vault account has sufficient permissions on the server.

I went through every conceivable setting in AD, EV and Exchange trying to work out what had happened and why it wasn't working on this one server but was fine on the other 3.
After much head scratching I resorted to our support company and the guy there tracked it down to a problem with EV talking to a GC. Whilst it was working on all the other servers on this one it wasn't but what you need to do is add a registry entry to tell Outlook (on the EV server) to talk to the nearest GC,

MS have a technote here on this but the skinny is as follows

If you are running a version of Exchange Server that is earlier than Exchange Server 2010, use the following steps to force Outlook to identify and use the closest global catalog server yourself.
  1. Click Start, and then click Run.
  2. In the Open box, type regedit.exe, and then click OK.
  3. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider
    Note You may have to create the registry path.
  4. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
    Value name: Closest GC
    Data type: REG_DWORD
    Radix: Hexadecimal
    Value data: 0x00000001
  5. Quit Registry Editor.

Comments

  1. Manoj C7 January 2013 at 13:43

    This is good point and can be one of the reason\solution. However, I must point that this is just one of the reason\solution which is root cause for this error. There are many other reasons which can cause this kind of error. A simple search on Symantec support site can tell you many more reasons responsible for generating similar events. A customer should also see what all events generated, go through archiving task dtraces to find reason and then do any of such steps. Also this solution depends on what kind of deployment architecture customer have in their environment. So one should analyze careful to evaluate this type of errors and associated events as you did and then apply solution which fits as per the error in their environment.

    Thanks for posting this.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scripting DNS entries

For reasons to do with DR we needed to change our IP addressing scheme, either for our servers or for our PCs and printers and what not. Obviously changing PCs and printers was a whole lot easier due to the possible issues of inept developers’ hard coding IP addresses causing no end of problems with re-addressing the servers. This has entailed changing all the DNS entries for our printers, (whatever happened to the paperless office?) That in itself is no real challenge, they all have web interfaces so a quick connect and amend the setting then next printer. Updating the DNS entries was going to be a bit tiresome so I did a quick Google on how to do this with a script and up popped DNSCMD. You can run this from a CMD box on your PC, the main options you need to know are /recorddelete and /recordadd. To delete a record you simple need to type dnscmd <ServerName> /recorddelete <ZoneName> <NodeName> <RRType> <RRData>[/f] What does all that mean? Well i
Read more

Windows Phone to iPhone - a painful transition

Windows Phone died a death due to a whole heap of incompetence from Microsoft.  My phone was an old Nokia 925, about 4 1/2 years old and bought and paid by my company. There were always low requirements for company phones, if it rung and you answered it, all was good. Then Hangouts reared its head (Google want to destroy MS, so WP support) but third-party support gave a stay of execution. The final nail was a requirement for out of hours support software that had no app for Windows Phone. I had to be “downgraded” to an iPhone 6s (yes, it is a low spec 2 version old iPhone, better hardware than my 925 but not really up there as a current version, how my company loves their staff, buy expensive crap rather than cheap crap). Stuff that just worked on my old phone, now needs 'me' to be re-engineered to work the Apple way.  This is only slightly less bad than the Google eat all your life and sell it back to you way, but it is like stepping back in to the 1990s Microsoft way
Read more