Now you may have the issue where the green arrow which means “move request” is by a mailbox you want to move and if you try to move the mailbox you will notice you don’t have the option to move the mailbox.

This is because the mailbox has been moved before and you must clear the previously completed move request to enable you to move the mailbox again.

So if we go to Move request tab and simply clear the move request of the mailbox we want to move, we will then have the option to move the mailbox

Daniel Davies

When migrating a mailbox to Exchange 2010 i came across an issue, where every time i tried to move the specific mailbox i got the below error.

Property Expression “User name” isn’t valid. Valid values are : Strings that includes ‘@’, where ‘@’ cannot be the last character.

Resolution

 The username i was trying to move did not have an @ sign in his name so i didn’t see why this was failing, so this prompted me to look at the users account in AD.

I viewed the properties of the user account and then i checked the account tab, and i spotted there was no domain name specified in the user login name, which would explain why exchange was seeing it as “username@” so i added the domain entry in and then retried the move via exchange and it worked fine

Hope this helps.

Daniel Davies

We came across an error today when we were trying to move a mailbox from Exchange 2003 onto Exchange 2010 which was stopping us moving the mailbox.

Active Directory operation failed on DC. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.
Active directory response: 00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150A45, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0

1, Open Active Directory Users and Computers and View advanced features

2, Find the user account for the mailbox with the issue and go to the properties of this account

3, Go to the security tab and hit advanced

4, Now check the box that says include inheritable permission and apply this setting.

5, Now rerun the mailbox this move, this will fail but we are just running this to obtaining the CMDLET to cancel our previous move.

6, Run the remove request that you get displayed in the exchange console

Error:
The queue in “Store Name” database already contains a move request for ‘User’, while AD reports the mailbox as not being moved. It is possible that someone created this move request recently, while targeting a different domain controller, and AD replication did not yet occur. You can examine this move request by running ‘Get-MoveRequestStatistics -MoveRequestQueue ‘Store Name’ -MailboxGuid 4b525a83-cdc7-421b-84e1-ea6291cdd6d7 -IncludeReport | fl’. If you believe this to be an abandoned move request, you can remove it by running ‘Remove-MoveRequest -MoveRequestQueue ‘Store 3 Name’ -MailboxGuid 4b525a83-cdc7-421b-84e1-ea6291cdd6d7′.

Elapsed Time: 00:00:00

Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:01

7, Now Re-Run the mailbox move and this will complete

Daniel Davies

We came across an issue recently where we had placed a few servers into maintenance mode and when we stopped maintenance mode the servers did not change back to a healthy state, they were in a not monitored state.

We left it for an hours to see if the agent would sort itself out to no avail.

It appeared that the agent seemed to be stuck in the not monitored state, so what i did next was to try and refresh the agent was to put it into maintenance mode for 10 minutes and then stop the maintenance mode and within minutes the state changed to healthy again

Hope this helps

Daniel Davies

I have a SCCM server installed on site to deal with client and server machine patching. After the last patch Tuesday I noticed that the windows updates under Software Updates had not been synchronized with the latest updates. To dig deeper into this I navigated under System Status – Site Status – <<site name>> -Component Status and noticed that the SMS_WSUS_SYNC_MANAGER component was in a warning state. By right clicking and selected Show Messages – All i was able to see a bit more information:

The entire description is as follows:

SMS WSUS Synchronization failed.

Message: Thread was being aborted.

Source: Microsoft.SystemsManagementServer.SoftwareUpdatesManagement.WSyncAction.WSyncAction.SyncUpdates.

Seems strange that the thread was being aborted so I decided to have a look at the good old Application event viewer to see what was going on at a similar time. I found that the SMS_SITE_BACKUP component was running a split second after the SMS_WSUS_SYNC_MANAGER component which was causing the SMS_SITE_VSS_WRITER component to stop the SMS services as part of preparing for backup (wow that’s a lot of components in one sentence!)

I then changed the schedule start after property for this back up component task by navigating to Site Management – <<Site Name>> – Site Settings – Site Maintenance – Tasks – Backup ConfigMgr Site Server Properties and set the Schedule to run at a time that doesn’t conflict with the synchronization (just an hour later than it was).

This solved the issue and updates are synchronizing happily again now

Hopefully this can save you some valuable troubleshooting time!

You may come across an issue where you need to import multiples PST’s into users mailboxes but you don’t want to do it manually, if that the case you’ve came to the right place

First thing to do is  install outlook 2010 on your exchange server.

Once this is done you can use Rob’s (http://risualblogs.com/blog/author/robb/) Powershell command to automate this.

Follow the below instructions to help you achieve the bulk PST imports you need.

Instructions

Before we run this powershell script we will first need to place all the PST’s locally on the server we are doing the imports on (Mailbox Server) which is simple enough.

And finally before running this script we need to create a csv file, to do this see below.

1, open notepad.exe

2, now write the following text on your first line in notepad “mailbox,pst” (without quotation marks)

3, Go to the next line and then type a users mailbox  first and then add a comma and finally type the name of the users pst.

4, You should end up with a list like below with all the users you want to import

mailbox,pst
Daniel1,Daniel1.pst
Dan,Dan.pst
Daniel,daniel.pst

5, Finally save the file as a csv file and name it “pstlocations.csv”

6, Now open notepad again and copy all the below text into it. Be sure to only change the three values I’ve made bold and you can change the directory they are pointing to, to suit your environment and also you can change what you want to import into the mailbox by altering the IncludeFolders switch (currently only importing Contacts and Calendar items). Finally save this as a PS1 file and run this via the Exchange management Shell.
_________________________________________________________________________

###Script to import calendar and contact items from pst’s to mailboxes

#set this to the path containing the pst files

$pstfolderpath = “c:\psts\”

$users = import-csv ‘C:\pstlocations.csv’

#dont change below this line

foreach ($record in $users)

{

            $filelocation = $pstfolderpath + $record.pst

            $mailbox = $record.mailbox

            Write-Host -foregroundcolor “green” “Importing” $filelocation” to mailbox” $record.mailbox

            $command = “import-mailbox -Identity $mailbox -PSTFolderPath $filelocation -IncludeFolders ‘\Contacts’, ‘\Calendar’”

            invoke-expression $command

}

____________________________________________________________________________                                                                                             

Hope this Helps

Daniel Davies

We came across an issue recently in Exchange 2010 where i needed to import a user PST into there mailbox, however when we tried to run the command from the Exchange Shell to do this it just came up with the following error code.

Command

Import-mailbox –identity Test –PstFolderPath C:\PSTS

Error Code

Error occurred in the step: Approving object

An unknown error had occurred., error code: -2147221219

 Basically our issue was that there was no HOMEMDB attribute set for the System Attendant on each Exchange server.

Resolution

1, Open ADSIEDIT and connect to the configuration partition

2, Now we need to drill down into the AD database, expand configuration.

3, Expand CN=Services and then expand CN=Microsoft Exchange and CN=<Domain name>

4, Expand CN=Administrative Groups and then Exchange Administrative Group(FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)

5,Expand CN=Servers and mailbox server you are trying to import on.

6, Now right click CN=Microsoft System Attendant choose properties and check for the homeMDB Value

7, If the Value is set to <not set> here lies our problem.

8, To Find the value to add into the MDB attribute , simply press CN=Databases which is just above the CN=Servers you located to.

9, Now if you choose any storage group and press properties and then view and copy the value for Distinguished name for this storage group

10, Now place the value you just copied into the HomeMDB attribute  to overwrite the not set value and apply this.

11, Give the domain some time to replicate this change and then restart the mailbox servers Information Service

12, You should now be able to import PST’s into the users mailboxes

13, It would be a good idea to add the distinguished name value you copied into every mailbox servers HOMEMDB attribute.

Hope this Helps You Out

Daniel Davies

You may come across an issue from time to time.  Where you have an IIS website and when you type the URL of the IIS Site into your IE it brings up a homepage, but you would like to change the homepage for reason such as you would like to allow users to access a specific part of the site easier.

 For example

You have gave your IIS site a host header of “test” but you would like users to hit a different web page within the site when they simply type the host header in.

Currently they are hitting the below webpage when typing http://test

But this is not the page you want them to hit when they type in http://test we would like them to be redirected to http://test/test2 (Below Page)

Resolution

To get this to work we will first have to create a htm file which redirects us to our desired site “http://test/test2”

1, Open IIS Manager

2, Now expand the console until you get to your website and then switch to content view.

3, Right Click and press explore

4, Now we need to create the HTM in this location “C:\Test\”

5, Now open notepad and type the following in and put the url of what you want as your homepage and save it in the location we found out above and name it default.htm (Code Below was supplied by Rob http://risualblogs.com/blog/author/robb/)

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv=”REFRESH” content=”0;url=http://Type Your URl”></HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

6, Now we need to make the “default.htm” the default document. So go back into the IIS Console  and switch back to Features View and double click Default Document.

7, Now simply press add and type in the name of the htm file and hit ok

8, The final thing we need to do is to move the default.htm file to the top of the default document list so it takes precedence. So simply click default.htm and press move up.

9, You will get a message pop up simply press yes as this is what we want to do

10, Now when you type in your host header URL (http://test ) you will get redirected to the correct page (http:\test\Test2).

Hope this Helps You

I recently had to perform the above task and although it has been documented, i thought i would give my view on it and some of the things that seem to be slightly unclear usually.

So you want to migrate DHCP from one server to another (both 2003) maybe for consolidation purposes or to decommission old hardware etc. The first step is to make sure you know the environment, are there multiple subnets, VLAN’s etc, if so chances are you will need to take into consideration the IP helpers for DHCP on the switches (presuming they are layer 3) or routers, these point the DHCP broadcasts in the right direction when looking for an IP address. If these networking points are taken into consideration then the following steps can be followed

1. On the current DHCP server run the following command – netsh dhcp server export C:\dhcp.txt all
2. Move the resulting file to the destination server
3. Install DHCP service on the destination server – Start >> Control Panel >> Add or Remove programs >> Add/remove windows components >> Networking services >> DHCP (you may need installation media for this)
4. Log onto the destination server with an account that is an Explicit member of the local Administrators group, it cannot be a user account in a group that is a member of Local Administrators (so if on a domain controller which i was, you will need to restart in DSRM mode and use the administrator account this way)
5. Make sure that the DHCP service is started on the destination server and then run the following command – netsh dhcp server import C:\dhcp.txt all making sure that C:\dhcp.txt is the full path to where you copied the file locally
6. After receiving the message that the command completed successfully exit the command prompt.

Using this method of the netsh command migrates the DHCP configuration as well as the current lease configuration which prevents conflicting IP addresses

You finally must authorize the new DHCP server in AD, This must be done using an account that is a member of the Enterprise administrators group (So if on a DC you will need to reboot normally again to log on with a domain account to do this). You can do this in the DHCP console by Right clicking the server name and selecting Authorize. You should then be able to stop and disable the DHCP server service on the old DHCP server and receive DHCP addresses from the new one!

Note – If on a DC and you cannot remember or do not have the DSRM password documented you can change it easily from the Command Prompt on the DC by:

• Start >> Run >> ntdsutil >> Ok
• Type Set dsrm password null and press Enter
• Type Reset password on server null and press enter
• enter and confirm the new password

null indicates it is the local server you are changing this password on, if it was on a remote server you wanted to change the password then you would replace ‘null’ with the server name e.g. ‘set dsrm password server1’