The Grumpy IT Admin

We have had some problems with our EqualLogics (no surprise there) doing the most simple of thing, emailing through our exchange 2010 relay. 2003 worked fine, however 2010 seems to cause a number of problems. Small notification emails are fine, however, when it comes to the diagnostics emails with their vast 2-5MB attachments something chokes and we get a time out error at the EqualLogics end, something like 'diag' or 'update' was unable to send output using e-mail. SMTP returned the following error: TimeOut] Some Googling suggests that it is either the Tarpitting Microsoft have stuck in that creates a 5 second delay to proceedings for security, or something a bit more deeper in the SMTP protocol on the receive connector on the CAS\Hub server, namely chunking and binary mime settings and it is all related to BDAT. By default the Tarpitting is set to 5 seconds, some folks have found that setting this to 0 or turning it off works for them, it didn't for me, nei...

A power outage at the weekend caused unscheduled shutdowns on our servers. All came back OK and were working fine. However our backup of the Exchange 2010 server failed as Backup Exec could not connect to the Database. We have a DAG set up to a DR site, we failover manually if required and for when we need to do maintenance, it all works rather well. DAGs have an IP address assigned to them which is actually related to the Windows Cluster service, which if the servers are in different subnets have be different depending on which server is active. I believe this is controlled by the Cluster service, Exchange then updated DNS to point to the new server when you move to a different active server. Unfortunately despite not having auto failover the cluster service moved the IP address, Exchange, however, did not update DNS as the active DB had not moved. Bringing the server back up didn't change anything. So we now had the cluster IP address in the DR site and the DB on the productio...

As we support 1500 users we don't manually install anything on PCs. it is all done remotely using, at the moment, Altiris Deployment console (not the nasty web based 7.1 but the rather more pleasent 6.9 with win32 console). We use simple command line stuff to run installers in quiet mode such as MSIs with a /qn or setups with recoreded ini answer files. Every now and again we come across an installer that either doesn't support silent install or tries to do something stupid at the end like display a read me file, complete Muppetry! However we often come across stuff that requires prerequistes installed like Exchange 2010 Management tools. This needs a bunch of Windows features set up in advance, but guess what? The installer knows this but doesn't install them for you and Microsoft doesn't tell you what they are in any documentation or how you should go about installing them, though it does say if you run Setup /r:MT it will install silently, don't believe it, it...

Here's some more weirdness related to Exchange. Basically we saw a lot of slowness, not all the time and not on all sites. This slowness would manifest itself in response times from the CAS/HUB server that sit behind a loadbalancer which comes from Kemp. The CAS/HUB servers use the loadbalancer as the default gateway, now for all our traffic this worked extremely well, the only issue we got was this slow down. Even connecting to the server via RDP would be very slow and unresponsive, the cure was to vMotion the loadbalancer. More of a workaround than a fix but it helped. After much troubleshooting and packet sniffing and a conversation with Kemp it was ascertained that if we change the NIC type from a VMXNET3 to a E1000 all our problems would disappear. Surprisingly this actually worked. Now the CAS/HUB servers are much more responsive and don't fall in to an apathetic well of despair. Would I build an Exchange system that was fronted by a loadbalaner again? Probably n...

Didn't think I would have to revisit this one so soon. Our Exchange servers were patched up to date with Windows patches and lo and behold all hell breaks loose. Nothing major just users can't connet to their mailboxes from Outlook, again. OWA is fine, it's just Outlook shows as off line, except for users in cached mode, or users that tried 20 times to connect... or that user sitting over there. Moved some affected users to cached mode and all was well again for them, not me though, tried cached and non cached and no joy, tried and new profile and got straight in, back to old profile and no joy, was it the PC updates that went out last night? Well affected users were on a different patching schedule to me so probably not. It must be the patches applied to the Exchange server, we had this last time they were patched with Roll-up 3. So we dropped the one of the CAS servers out of the (load balanced) cluster and rebooted it, dragged it back in and then did teh same w...

After lots of poking around by Microsoft it would seem this is a spurious bug that is falsely reporting an error. Basically Microsoft couldn't find anything wrong with our AD configuration and from what they have gleaned from other users that have the same problem it isn't a problem. Most of the initial symptoms we suffered such as not being able to add a mailbox into a profile seems to have disappeared but the logged error persists. Apparently it will be fixed in roll up 5, which suggest that they have already finalized roll up 4 and it is not worthy of an interim fix. Problem – Getting event-1(Source-MSExchange Autodiscover) after installing Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 KB2685289 on the CAS Server Resolution – This is a known bug and is to be fixed in Exchange 2010 SP2 RU5

After updating our servers with Rollup 3 we started getting some odd errors, like users couldn't add mailboxes or set up new profiles. this seemed to clear itself but we are still seeing a number of errors in the event logs, specifically the following event Log Name:      Application Source:        MSExchange Autodiscover Date:          27/06/2012 21:57:16 Event ID:      1 Task Category: Web Level:         Error Keywords:      Classic User:          N/A Computer:      Description: Unhandled Exception "User setting 'PreferredSite' is not available. " We ended up talking to Microsoft and it appears to be a bug which is linked to our AD configuration but they have yet to get to bottom of exactly what. Will post more when I ...

Those of us who have bought in to the Microsoft experience also buy in to the regular updating of our servers and the software that runs on them. Updating is a good thing and needs to be done regularly, but for many, myself included, it can be an incredibly stressful experience after so many failed updates and upgrades, roll back and long nights recovering from a bad patch or uppdate, not just to Microsoft products but also to others applications, drivers and in the case of EqualLogics firmware. One bad update can bring hours or days of fun. Down to the nitty, gritty of the problem. We have an Exchange 2010 system which has taken around 12 months to get to an almost usable state. The main problem has been the way our Domain is made and the requirement to set up a very resilient infrastructure spread across 4 sites in the UK. The root .com domain is in the US and there are 5 sub-domains for each country below that. Each country is fairly autonomous and t...