TechiBee » Exchange 2007

Exchange 2003 – Queue Directory Corrupt

uma — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:29:21 +0000

For one of our client, we have received an alert stating that “The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error 0 (0×0)”.

The error seems to simple and everyone would just suggest to start the service back. But the root cause was different.

One of our colleague started working on the alert and here is the chronology of steps followed in resolving the issue. found that the Information Store service was in stopped state and started the service. Started verifying queues , encoutered error stating that “Default SMTP Virtual Server is unavailable”. Verified and found that SMTP Service was in started mode.

Escalated call to me and I’ve started working on the issue.

Upon further analysis, found that the SMTP Virtual Instance was stopped in ESM (Exchange System Manager). Tried to start the instance, encountered error stating that “Queue Directory is corrupted , hence the instance could not be started”.

Error logged in Eventlog & Error pop-up when accessed Queue Directory from explorer.

Executed following Steps to resolve issue:

1. Uninstalled existing Antivirus (AVG)

2. Executed chkdsk on volume in which the exchange database is stored. Found disk errors.

3. Executed chkdsk /f on the volume and restarted the server

4. Created new Queue Directory and pointed the path from ESM to the new folder.

5. Started SMTP Virtual Instance & Information Store Services.

Mails started flowing fine.

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Problems in recoverying emails “Recover Deleted Items” option in Outlook — Fixed

Sitaram Pamarthi — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:13:21 +0000

Outlook was unable to recover some or all of the items in this folder. Make sure you have the required permissions to recover items in this folder and try again. If the problem persists, contact your administrator

I came across this error while I(or my users) trying to restore bulk emails in outlook using “Recover Deleted Items” option. Single or little more emails restoration works fine but this issue is coming only when I attempt bulk restoration.

When this happened for the user, I am clue less what was happening. I went to event viewer on the server where user mailbox is hosted and observed below error when the user is attempting the restoration.

Event Type:     Error
Event Source:   MSExchangeIS
Event Category: General
Event ID:       9646
Date:           7/19/2010
Time:           3:45:47 PM
User:           N/A
Computer:       MYEXCHANGE
Description:
Mapi session “/o=ORG/ou=SITE/cn=Recipients/cn=myuser” exceeded the maximum of 500 objects of type “objtFolder”.

After a little bit of googling I found an article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830829/en-us) which is talking about similar issue and increasing the limits on Object types that you see in event viewer should fix the issue. I tried increasing the ObjFolder limit to 1000(note: 500 is the default; if you don’t find this key, it is safe to create one as per KB) on my exchange server but still it didn’t work and was saying exceeded the limit of 1000 this time. At this point I was not sure what was the optimum value to which I should increase this limit to make the restoration happen. As I didn’t find answer to this question in google, I polled one of friend who is with MS and knows more about exchange. He said there are no limits defined as such and it’s a trial and error method we should try. I bumped it to 10,000 this time and restoration worked. Along with this informaiton, my friend passed me a note as well. The more limit you put the more the load on your exchange server. So, be cautious while increasing the limits and I prefer to do it during off hours so that load will be less on the server and your users will be away anyways and that also gives you ample time to troubleshoot any unforeseen issues.

Additional note: While trying this you might see events about exceeding the limits of other object types described in aforementioned KB. You should create necessary registry keys for them as well to make your restoration suceessfull. Don’t forget to revert your settings once you are done with restoration; otherwise it will impact your server performance. Generally this will come into effect after store restart. Otherwise you can wait for 15-30 mins to make store pick these changes without restarting the IS.

Hope this information helps you.

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Windows 2008 R2 supports Exchange 2007 now

Sitaram Pamarthi — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:26:07 +0000

With recent service pack(SP3), exchange started supporting installation on Windows 2008 R2. More details at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/06/21/455145.aspx

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MS says, having no access to internet will cause exchange to timeout at times

Sitaram Pamarthi — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:50:23 +0000

Are you facing frequent time out issues with your exchange server? Your problem might be related to the components described in http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/05/14/454877.aspx.

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How to check mailbox creation time

Sitaram Pamarthi — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:45:00 +0000

If you are interested to know when your mailbox is created, try below PowerShell Oneliner…Basically what this does is, it uses Outlook application and fetches one of it’s schema property named PR_CREATION_TIME which contains the mailbox creation time.

(New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application).Session.DefaultStore.GetRootFolder().PropertyAccessor.GetProperty(http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x0E580102)

[Source:Shavy Blog]

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How to change default search scope in Exchange 2007

Sitaram Pamarthi — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:18:00 +0000

While executing commands like Get-Mailbox, you often receive errors like identify is not found in default search scope. This you will see in a multi domain environment in general. In such cases, either you need to make the environment to look in whole forest for objects or ask powershell/cmdlet to ignore the scope.

Here are the two ways I am talking about…

Set the search scope to forest level :- to do this, execute the below command

$AdminSessionADSettings.ViewEntireForest = $true

Make cmdlet to ignore the scope:- to do this, pass -ignoredefaultscope argument to cmdlet

Get-Mailbox -IgnoreDefaultScope -Identity “cn=username,ou=ouname,dc=domainname,dc=com”

Note that, incase of ignore default scope, you should parse only DN to -identity parameter.

Let me know if you figureout some other way.

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Notification about meeting request forwards in Exchange 2007

Sitaram Pamarthi — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:47:19 +0000

When a Exchange 2007 user forwards a meeting request to someone, the meeting organizer will get a Notification with subject “Meeting Forward Notification: [actual meeting subject]” saying that meeting request is forwarded to people listed in notification email body. Though Microsoft says that it is a new feature, many of the users felt it annoying. In this article I am going to talk about how to disable this behavior.

To disable this functionality for a single mailbox, use the below cmdlet

Get-MailboxCalendarSettings -Identity user1 | Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true

Note: You can not really disable this behavior(or I haven’t come across any such procedure), but by applying above procedure, you are making meeting request forward notification messages to go directly into “Deleted Items”. This way users won’t get annoyed with these notification messages. Alternately, you can configure a HTS rule to identify and drop messages with subject containing the word, “Meeting Forward Notification”.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

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How to set quota notification interval in Exchange 2007

Sitaram Pamarthi — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:50:00 +0000

The intent of this post is to give some details on how to set quota notification internal in Exchange 2007. During this interval, a wanning message will be sent to users who are exceeding(or near to) their mailbox limits.

Set Quota notification schedule on a given Mailbox database:

Set-mailboxdatabase -identity “MBX1\SG1\S1″ -QuotaNotificationSchedule (“Sun.6:00 AM-Sun.6:15 AM”, “Mon.6:00 AM-Mon.6:15 AM”, “Tue.6:00 AM-Tue.6:15 AM”, “Wed.6:00 AM-Wed.6:15 AM”, “Thu.6:00 AM-Thu.6:15 AM”, “Fri.6:00 AM-Fri.6:15 AM”, “Sat.6:00 AM-Sat.6:15 AM”)

Set Quota notification schedule on all Mailbox databases:

Get-MailboxDatabase | Set-mailboxdatabase -QuotaNotificationSchedule (“Sun.6:00 AM-Sun.6:15 AM”, “Mon.6:00 AM-Mon.6:15 AM”, “Tue.6:00 AM-Tue.6:15 AM”, “Wed.6:00 AM-Wed.6:15 AM”, “Thu.6:00 AM-Thu.6:15 AM”, “Fri.6:00 AM-Fri.6:15 AM”, “Sat.6:00 AM-Sat.6:15 AM”)

Set Quota notification schedule on all Mailbox databases on a single server:

Get-MailboxDatabase -Server MBX1 | Set-mailboxdatabase -QuotaNotificationSchedule (“Sun.6:00 AM-Sun.6:15 AM”, “Mon.6:00 AM-Mon.6:15 AM”, “Tue.6:00 AM-Tue.6:15 AM”, “Wed.6:00 AM-Wed.6:15 AM”, “Thu.6:00 AM-Thu.6:15 AM”, “Fri.6:00 AM-Fri.6:15 AM”, “Sat.6:00 AM-Sat.6:15 AM”)

You can change the notification schedule timings as you want.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

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Bulk User mailbox creation in Exchange 2007

Sitaram Pamarthi — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:27:00 +0000

While working on setting up my test Exchange 2007 setup, I got a requirement to create 100 users in my environment. I know how to do it with Vbscript but creating mailbox enabled users increases the complexity of script a bit. Then I explored PowerShell and came up with below piece of code. It might help you too… :-)

[PS] C:\>$password = Read-Host “Enter the password” -AsStringString
[PS] C:\>foreach ($number in 1..100) { new-mailbox -name user$number -Alias user$number -database “MBX1\SG1\S1″ -organizationalUnit “SPDOMAIN.COM/INDIA/Users” -UserPrincipalName user$number@spdomain.com -Displayname User$number -password $password }

Please note that, the password will be applied for all 100 test accounts we are creating. Above code creates 100 test user accounts with mailbox enabled on MBX1

\SG1\S1″ store.

Happy Learning..,

Sitaram Pamarthi

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Restore Exchange 2007 CMS when resources got deleted accidentally

Sitaram Pamarthi — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:09:00 +0000

http://blogs.technet.com/timmcmic/archive/2009/08/12/i-accidentally-deleted-an-exchange-2007-clustered-resource-what-should-i-do.aspx

The above article has good amount of information embedded in it explaining what to do when you delete an exchange cluster resource from a CMS. Exchange clusters are not like any other cluster aware applications which can be restored by simply recreating the resources in cluster group. One example is, SQL. You can do simple recreation of cluster resource if you delete one from SQL instance. But when it comes to Exchange, it is little bit different. Each exchange resource maintains variety of references with each other and with active directory. It also stores it’s unique information about exchange clustered resources in active directory; so recreating the cluster resources manually from cluster admin doesn’t make any sense. You might successfully able to create resources using cluster admin, but exchange will not recognize and use it.

So, follow below steps when you delete any exchange related cluster resource from CMS group. When I say exchange related clustered resource, I mean, Exchange Information Store Instance (CMSNAME), Exchange System Attendant Instance (CMSNAME) and Storage name (CMSNAME).

Note down the values NetBIOS name and IP address of the CMS

Run Stop-ClusteredMailboxServer -Identity “CMSName” -StopReason:”your comment text goes here”

Go to command line and run setup.com /clearLocalCMS /cmsName:”CMSName” to clear the stale entries from cluster; setup.com will be available in your installation media.
Run setup.com /recoverCMS /cmsName:”CMSName” /cmsIPv4Address:”IPAddress” from command prompt. This uses the configuration in active directory and reinstalls the CMS with the old configurations.

Hope this helps you and use at your own Risk. :-)

Happy Learning…,

Sitaram Pamarthi

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