Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Exchange 2007 Message Discovery and Removal Across Mailboxes

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Originally found this post on the Technet forums which links to this MS Exchange Team blog from a few years ago.

This cmdlet is great for discovering or removing messages by searching one or many mailboxes. Excellent for removing large messages sent to large distribution groups or virus/spam messages if identified early by the administrator, etc.

A couple of errors that might be returned by this cmdlet are:

[0] [ERROR] Error was found for (SourceMailboxEmailAddress) because: Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. Failed to copy messages to the destination mailbox store with error:
MAPI or an unspecified service provider.
ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749164

[0] [ERROR] Error was found for (SourceMailboxEmailAddress) because: Error occurred in the step: Creating target folder in the target mailbox. An unknown error has occurred., error code: -2147221233

These are permissions issues. The account running the command needs to have full permissions to the source mailbox (first error code) and the destination mailbox (second error code). This is explained well here

That said, also take a look at this if you are sure that permissions are set correctly

Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

Friday, May 7th, 2010

I may be a bit late in discovering this since it was last published in 2007, but this tool is brilliant. In short, it automatically discovers and diagrams Active Directory domains, OUs, Sites, Exchange organizations, Applications and Servers.

It requires Visio 2003 or 2007 and uses the .NET Framework v2.0 and can be found here

SQL Server 2005 Server Level Collation Sequence

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Installing a new SQL Server 2005 instance that requires SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS collation sequence at the server level. This is the install default if the server’s Regional Settings are English (United States) – this particular server wasn’t. Found plenty of information online regarding changing the server collation sequence but the exact process escaped me. Below is really just about formatting the command but may help someone…

To change the server level collation, a rebuild of system databases is required. Do this by running setup.exe (the installer) from the command line. The following command from Books Online (search for ‘run setup from command prompt’) is exactly what is required:

start /wait \setup.exe /qn INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER REINSTALL=SQL_Engine REBUILDDATABASE=1 SAPWD= SQLCOLLATION=

Note the location is specified. This is required even though you will be running this from the location that setup.exe is in. I was running it from a local folder path (not a CD/DVD drive) and it required the path to setup.exe in full (i.e. can’t just use “setup.exe /qn …” even if your are at the location setup.exe is in) otherwise it would fail to locate SQLRun_SQL.msi or SQLrun.msi, can’t recall which.

The /qn switch which is for msiexec. It will run the setup process with no UI, it could also run with /qb, probably just as fine.

Exchange 2007 – 0×8004010F Object could not be found

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Post reboot of an Exchange public folder & mailbox server, this error was received by Outlook 2003 clients. Outlook 2007 clients had no problems. Reason is because the public folder database was offline, i.e. failed to mount. The following services had failed to start: Information Store, System Attendant and Service Host.

After restarting these services successfully, the Information Store was able to mount the PF database and the error is cleared for the clients. The PF database stored the offline address book for these clients and that was the object that could not be found.

This MS KB article, covers a different reason that the same error might be seen client side – because the selected OAB for the mailbox database the client was located on had an invalid (old, deleted, ???) offline address book configured.

Also, the reason that the services originally failed to start appears to be because the IS service was unable to contact an Active Directory domain controller when starting up:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeIS
Event Category: General
Event ID: 1121
Date: 10/8/2009
Time: 12:00:46 PM
User: N/A
Computer: PAC-MSG-HTR1
Description:
Error 0×96f connecting to the Microsoft Active Directory.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Possibly an idea to set the recovery action of these services to restart in X minutes time, especially if the site is recovering from a power outage or some other reason that both the Exchange servers and AD servers would be down or restart at the same time.

Finally, this link [msexchangeteam.com] has lots of good information on the various possible scenarios resulting in an 0×800401oF MAPI error

Find All Files Owned By A User – Windows Server 2003

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

If you have quotas enabled on a Windows file server, you may need to locate where all the files a user owns are to work out why their quota just keeps going up and up (and up)…

FSUtil in Windows Server 2003 can do just that (and a lot more). Use the following syntax to find all files owned by a specific user:
fsutil file findbysid <userid> <path>

Userid can be the user’s windows login and the path should be the base directory, it will recurse through sub-directories. Script it up a little and you can get a decent report of quota usage by path.

There is a whole bunch of file server administrative tasks that can be scripted using FSUtil. Very, very good.

Also, this tool (delybown.exe) looks cool, though i haven’t tried it but if it works as advertised would definitely be useful.