Servus

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

In any email environment where quotas are enforced, requests to increase quotas are a regular occurrence. The fact of the matter is storage costs money and therefore must be managed in a meaningful way. There has to be some kind of process or mechanism to determine if a quota increase is justified. [...]