Scott Feltmann's Blog

I recently performed an Exchange 2007 upgrade for a client who was moving from Exchange 2003.  As part of their compliance with some regulations they are required to journal the activity of certain mailboxes within their organization.  Journaling in this situation was enabled on the database level so all users in the database will have all emails sent and received forwarded to an external 3^rd party mail server.  This was done through a send connector to the 3^rd party’s domain. 

The problem the client was experiencing in Exchange 2007 was that all outbound emails originating internally were being sent to the external journaling provider however, all inbound emails were not being forwarded to the journaling provider. 

The client contacted the Journaling provider and from a conversation it was determined that when an inbound message arrived to the Exchange Mailbox Server, it would be forwarded to the journaling provider from the original sender, the original sender being someone from outside the organization.  This immediately put up a red flag in my head.  I started to think, Exchange receives an email to send to a 3^rd party, from a person outside of this trusted organization.   Exchange was refusing to send the message!  So, the thought came into play, how to configure this thing to allow it to relay to the 3^rd party email server.  Anyone?  Anyone?  Ok, the solution was actually quite simple and once I understood what was happening it was easy to figure out.  I simply setup an Internal Relay!  Yup, that’s it.  The Internal Relay will allow Exchange 2007 to receive emails for a specific domain, query Active Directory for the mailbox and deliver the mail for that domain if it is found internally.  If the mailbox is not found internally Exchange will then Relay the email for the 3^rd party mailbox server specified in the Send connector which was already configured above!  Walla, problem solved!

For more information on what an Internal Relay Domain is click here.

Have a great day!

So, an interesting call came to me last week regarding a client who was having some issues with Voicemails from Cisco Unity (I believe it was 7.0) transporting voice mails to Exchange.  Their Exchange 2007 instance was moved from W2K8 to W2K8 R2 due to an issue they had with the W2K8 server.  Not realizing that Unity (or Exchange) was not compatible with Windows 2008 R2 they started to have problems.

Basically the problem they were having was when a voice mail was left for a user, it was not being delivered to the user.  Voicemails would pile up on the Unity server.  The recommendation was to reinstall Exchange 2007 on a W2K8 server WITHOUT R2.  The client decided to take a path to resolve the issue but I am not certain what they did.

On another note Exchange 2007 is not supported on Windows 2008 R2 yet, however I have heard rumors that if you install Exchange 2007 SP2 on Windows 2008 R2 if you run the install in Windows Vista Compatibility mode the install will work.  When will Exchange 2007 officially support Windows 2008 R2?  Well, Exchange 2007 SP3 will allow support for Windows 2008 R2.   Exchange 2007 SP3 should be released some time this year (2010). 

Moral of the story, do not put Exchange 2007 on W2K8 R2, and do not use Unity with Windows 2008 R2. 

I also understand that Cisco Unity does not support Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers.  Exchange 2007 SP2 will support Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers.  So, take your pick, but you can’t use Unity to query W2K8 R2 DCs. 

I hope this helps some people out there!  Thanks for visiting.

So, yesterday I was out at a client site to review their Exchange 2007 deployment.  In my previous post I talked about how the Subnet the Exchange 2007 servers were in did not have the IP subnet associated with an AD site.  Well, I did come across another interesting issue that was a bit more troublesome.

The client is deploying an Exchange 2007 SP2 environment leveraging a Single Copy Cluster (SCC) and two CAS/HUB servers. 

While testing the failure over process of the SCC we came to the point where using the manage clustered mailbox command in the Exchange Management Console or the Exchange Management Shell would not work.  We were receiving an error message that the Database failed to initialize.  The error log was huge, errors on creating the D drive (where the database was located), errors opening the database, mounting the database, it just wasn’t working!

I then suggested to go back and use the MS Failover Cluster Management tool.  We took a node off line, and failover worked.  How Odd!  This appeared to be an issue with permissions on the servers.  Something was prevent Exchange from performing the failover.  We then tried another failover vial the managed clustered mailbox command and I noticed that the shared disk drives were attempting to fail over to the passive node but they couldn’t!

We then proceeded to check permissions into the Windows Cluster and Exchange Cluster, adjusted a few settings but nothing worked.  Well, I then asked, is there a Group Policy blocking any time of assignment to “Manage auditing and security log”, he said no.  We checked Group Policy to be certain and there was nothing configured.  I then asked him to take a look at the local security policy on the system, sure enough, only the Administrators were in the group Manage auditing and security log.  Once adding the Exchange Servers to this group on each system the Single Copy Cluster was able to fail over with no problems! 

I am not certain as to why the Exchange Servers did not get added to the local security policy, there was nothing in group policy or anything on the system to over write this to my knowledge.  But none the less, it is very important to make sure the Exchange Servers do have access to the security setting.

Either way it was quite an interesting day at my client site, a few more issues came up but nothing as notable as the ones discussed here. 

Hope you have a great day!

So, I was out at a client site yesterday to review the work they have completed so far on their Exchange 2007 deployment.  There were two issues that we came across that were unique that I thought I would mention to the population out there.  Hopefully this information will be able to help someone.

The first problem I noticed was the error message that stated Exchange was not part of an active directory site.  This caused me to think, why would an error come up like this.  My first instinct was to do a Gpresult /r (Windows 2008) which listed out all the information about the computer and user.  The Computer said it belonged to the site Default-First-Site-Name.  Ok, so the server was recognizing that it was a member of the AD Site, but why was exchange balking at the issue?  Well, I asked the IT Admin to open up Active Directory Sites and Services and took a look in there.  Looking over AD Sites and Services I noted the client had only one site configured, Default-First-Site-Name.  Thinking a little bit more about the situation I asked to see what subnets were configured for the site.  Well, upon review the site only had two subnets assigned to it.  Neither one of these Subnets included the subnet Exchange 2007 was in.   Talking to the Admin about this I learned that they had the same issue on the Hub Transport Servers and had to manually configure AD using ADSIEdit to insert the proper site name for the server to use!  Eww, not sure how this will impact their environment in the long run but when installing Exchange this should all be done automatically.  So, I had the admin add the Subnet to the AD Sites and Services and rebooted the mailbox servers, error gone, problem solved! 

The moral of the story above?  Make sure that you have your AD Sites and Services properly configured prior to deploying Exchange.  Oh yea, don’t forget, you need to have a domain Controller in the same AD Site as Exchange.  How the client ever got Exchange working is beyond me.  The workstation was seeing the AD Site but Exchange was not, hence the error. 

On Friday the MS Exchange team released Rollup 2 for Exchange Server 2007 SP2. 

For more information about this release you can go here.

To Download the update you can go here.

Enjoy!

I was upgrading Exchange 2007 with Exchange 2007 SP2 on a client exchange server this evening and came across the error “Setup cannot continue with the upgrade because the ‘beremote’ () process (ID: 1876) has open files.  Close the process and restart Setup.

The problem was a result of having Veritas Backup installed on the Exchange 2007 server.  The service “Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Servers” was locking the process and preventing the Exchange 2007 SP2 setup from running.  I had to go into Services and stop the “Backup Exec Remote Agent for Windows Servers” service.  Once I stopped this service I was able to proceed with the installation of Exchange 2007 SP2.

I had a call with a client yesterday regarding their Exchange 2007 mailbox server crashing with Dr. Watson errors. Their deployment is a Single Copy Cluster and to make matters worse when the error was occurring the cluster would not fail over.

This problem started for them when Mac users upgraded to the newest version of Snow Leopard. Based on conversations I had with them I’m guessing Snow Leopard was causing a high level of traffic to the Exchange 2007 mailbox server and caused the server to fail. I have actually seen this as well when an Outlook plug-in goes rouge and causes a high level of RPC connections to the mailbox server. The mailbox server in essence becomes unresponsive and users can not connect.

Asking about their updates they had not updated the Exchange servers with any Exchange roll ups for some time. I advised them to update their servers, which they did by deploying RU 9. They also asked Mac users not to use Snow Leopard for awhile until they get this thing out of control as their mailbox server was crashing every 20 minutes give or take. 

As a note the admin there said he was also familar with a another Exchange admin having the same experience.  This may not be directly related to Snow Leopard and Exchange not being updated but there is a chance. 

I’m thinking the RU9 will help, but I’ll let you know if the problem continues!