Here’s a quick command that will set the amount of days your lagged database is lagged for

Set-MailboxDatabaseCopy –Identity “DatabaseName\ServerName” –ReplayLagTime “7.0:0:0”

The Above command will set a lag retention of 7 days, but change the days to what you need (Please note the Maximum is 14 Days)

You receive the error below when attempting to login to Outlook Web Access (OWA). In an environment with multiple Client Access (CAS) servers where CAS proxying is being used:

Solution:

On the target CAS server, Ensure that Windows Integrated Authorisation is the only the authorisation method enabled on the OWA and ECP virtual directories.

Just a quick post to let you know how you can get the lag times that are set on the databases if you have any configured in your DAG:

Get-MailboxDatabase –Identity dbname -Status  | Format-List replaylagtimes

This should output something similar to this:

Hope this helps

Paul

Just a very quick blog to let you know how you can force an Object Discovery instead of waiting the desired amount of time specified in the Discovery rule which can sometimes take up to 24 hours.

You can just restart the “System Center Management” service and the discovery will kick in straight away

We had an issue recently when we migrated some exchange 2003 mailboxes onto an Exchange 2010 (Please note Exchange 2010 was SP1) Environment.

Basically after the migration all migrated users using Outlook in online mode could only see a blank Global Address List.

After looking into the issue we found that the resolution was to clear the value from the following attribute “msExchQueryBaseDN” via ADSIEDIT for the effected user.

After clearing the value the GAL suddenly appeared correctly

I believe Microsoft are looking into sorting this issue in Exchange 2010 SP2.

We came across an issues recently where one of our Exchange servers in a DAG started having the below errors appear in it’s Event Log.

Event ID 5301

Detected catalog corruption for database Database1

Event ID 123

At ’9/20/2011 3:17:57 PM’ the Microsoft Exchange Information Store Database ‘Database1’ copy on this server experienced a corrupted search catalog. Consult the event log on the server for other “ExchangeStoreDb” and “MSExchange Search Indexer” events for more specific information about the failure. Reseeding the catalog is recommended via the ‘Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy’ task.

Basically the events were pointing to a corrupted catalog, so we simply fixed this by reseeding the catalog from another server that has a valid copy of the catlog via the following command

“Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy –Identity Database1\Servername –CatalogOnly”

After running the above the errors disappeared

We were having a few SCOM alerts each day to inform us that the anti spam updates that usually come through Windows Update were failing to install on a customers Exchange 2007 server that was running on Windows Server 2008 SP1.

Looking in the c:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log file I could see that there was an error with BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) which Windows Update uses to download updates. This led me to use the bitsadmin tool to see if there was any downloads stuck:

1. Open a command prompt as administrator

2. Type in the following command and press enter:

bitsadmin /list /allusers

3. If there any lines in the output such as the following then we need to reset the jobs:

{04D0B991-54E3-41C4-B475-572D9E31BFE5} ‘WU Client Download’ SUSPENDED 0 / 1 0 / 13352278

To kill off the jobs is not as simple as it seems as even with an administrator account I could not kill off the jobs giving me an unable to cancel error. The task had to be run as system as a scheduled task:

1. Open up notepad and put in the following line:

bitsadmin /reset /allusers

2. Save the notepad file back as a batch file by save as and giving it a name with the extension .bat

3. Open Task Scheduler and create a new task that runs that batch file and put it to run at a certain time or manually.

4. Before the task runs we just need to change the user account that it runs under system by clicking on Change User or Group button, typing in system as object name and clicking on Check Names:

5. Either schedule the job to run or right click on the job and select run now.

Once the job has run then you can again run the bitsadmin /list /allusers and you should get an output showing no jobs:

The update for the Anti Spam updates should then install without any problems and you should no longer receive this alert.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Paul

In the Exchange 2010 Management Console, mailbox databases do not display any information in regards to the number of mailboxes stored within them. Below is a command which can be run in the Exchange Management Shell to retrieve this information:

(Get-MailboxDatabase) | ForEach-Object {Write-Host $_.Name (Get-Mailbox -Database $_.Name).Count}

Here is a quick command to list all of the drivers that are currently installed on your Windows 7 PC:

driverquery /v /fo csv > drvlist.csv

The command will output the information into a more readable CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. You can run this command as a normal user, it does not require administrator permissions.

Cheers

Paul

We recently added an additional Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller to our domain and found that the BitLocker tab in the Active Directory Users and Computers snap in was not appearing for the laptops.

In Windows Server 2008 you had to download and install the BitLocker Recovery Password Viewer for Active Directory Users and Computers tool and if it were the first time that this tool had been installed you had to run regsvr32.exe BdeAducExt.dll as an Enterprise Administrator.

This has been simplified in Windows Server 2008 R2:

1. Open Server Manager and click on Features.

2. Click on Add Features and browse to the following location:

             Remote Server Administration Tools –> Feature Administration Tools

3. Tag the option for BitLocker Drive Encryption Administration Utilities

4. Click on Next and then click on Install

5. You should then see that the installation was successful and can click on Close

If you open Active Directory Users and Computers snap in then you should see the BitLocker Recovery tab appear in the computer objects.

Cheers

Paul