Apparently, I was enjoying my birthday too much to notice that Microsoft released the New Office Visio Stencils. This stencil contains more than 300 icons to help you create visual representations of Microsoft Office or Microsoft Office 365 deployments including Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.
If there is one thing I learned early in my career, it is “metrics can show you anything you want them to show”. One metric companies often use to measure the availability or uptime of their systems is “number of 9s”. Computer system uptime is often measured by the percentage of uptime/availability in a year. When you hear the term 9s it is referring to the number of 9s in the percentage.
When managing Exchange 2007, the recipient scope for Exchange Management Shell (EMS) and Exchange Management Console (EMC) defaults to the domain where the Exchange servers are located. Recipient scope refers to the specified portion of the Active Directory directory service hierarchy that the Exchange Management Console and the Exchange Management Shell uses for recipient management. When you set the recipient scope to a specific location within Active Directory, you can view and manage all recipients stored in that location and all of the containers under it. If your environment has multiple domains, then you may need to change the scope of recipients to find specific accounts. Read More →
Recently, the time on all of my domain computers was out of sync. Each computer in my domain had the same time, but it was about 10 minutes slow. Domain computers get their time from your domain controller(s), so I looked into syncing the time of my DC with an internet time server. The steps below can be used to sync your DC with an internet time server.
While running some reports on Exchange backup success I could not figure out why when I ran get-mailboxdatabase | fl Name,LastFullBackup it would return a blank LastFull Backup. In Exchange Management console I could look at the properties of the database and see the Last full backup and the Last incrementation backup times.
After some search, Martin’s Wonderful World of Exchange had an answer for me. You need to add -status to your command or the backup properties where blank.
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Occassionally, I need to test the connection my Exchange server is making to Active Directory. I always forget the syntax of this command, so I am putting it in my blog.
Recently, I’ve gone through an exercise to rebuild the Exchange 2007 environment at my new company. The original Exchange 2007 design was not what I would call optimal, so we decided to just rebuild instead of fix all of the problems. Luckily, most of the users were still on Exchange 2003, so this made the rebuild fairly simple. We did however run into a couple of issues during the uninstall process which resulted in orphaned Exchange servers in the environment. The servers showed up in Exchange 2003 System Manager and Exchange 2007 Management Console, but the server no longer existed. You might run into the same issue if a server was improperly uninstalled or a server was prematurely reimaged, etc.
Sending email through telnet can be a useful tool when testing mail functionality, testing for open relays, or sending mail from admin scripts. This is something I don’t use often enough, so I’ve created this blog as a reminder.
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Here is a quick list of all Windows XP command line utilities.
There are a number of advantages to spreading your users’ mailboxes across your databases in Exchange 2007 versus putting department or groups in to a single database together. One of the biggest advantages is risk mitigation of a single database outage putting an entire group out of commission. Managing database sizes is also important in your environment to meet backup and restore Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in your organization.