Posts Tagged ‘Exchange Server’

What Exchange versions are supported with Windows Server 2012 Essentials?

Tuesday, November 6th, 2012

Microsoft designed Windows Server 2012 Essentials to work with onpremise Exchange server installations.  Below is the list of Exchange versions they support with the WS2012E console integration and the ARRconfig tools.

Exchange 2010 SP1

Exchange 2010 SP2

Exchange 2013

Personally, I’ve not tried Exchange 2013 as yet, so can’t vouch for it, but I will try it shortly and advise.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »

Help – My Exchange Services are Disabled!

Friday, August 24th, 2012

Ok – so this has been seen a few times now.  Long story short though is that when Exchange applies a Service Pack or Update Rollup, it sets a number of services to Disabled so that it can replace the exes involved.  I’ve seen it where for whatever reason however the installation fails without notice.  You think everything is ok till you reboot it and then you find out nothing works.  For the record – here’s a list of services that Exchange Disables and their normal state.  If you are faced with this issue, best advice is to set the services to the correct state, reboot and then try the Service Pack or Update Rollup again

Below are list of the services that will get disabled during the application of Exchange Service Packs and Update Rollups.  You can now see which state they should be in should you have this problem.

image

image

image

 

Now – also for good measure here are my Trend WFBS Services

image

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Useful Powershell commands for Exchange

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Here’s a few useful commands I regularly use in Powershell for Exchange management.

 

How can I list all users mailboxes on a given server?

Get-Mailbox –servername SERVER1

How can I list a users mailbox size?

Get-MailboxStatistics –identity “Wayne Small – SBSfaq.com” | select TotalItemSize

How can I list all users mailbox size on a given server?

This is a little more tricky – here’s a site that I grabbed a script from which did it very nicely.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Exchange Management Troubleshooter Tool

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I was working on a client site recently and could not figure out why their OWA was not working on one of their Exchange 2010 servers.  Furthermore I found that the Exchange Management Shell (powershell for Exchange) would not work as it could not connect to the Exchange server itself.  During my investigation, I found a cool utility that allowed me to look at the Default Website on the server in question and diagnose why the EMS would not work.  In the end, the issue I had was a simple one – the HP PowerManager software had taken over port 80 on the server as the clients tech did not configure it correctly to use an alternate port number.  But I figured it worthwhile to post about the Exchange Management Troubleshooter tool anyway in case it helps others.  You can download the tool here

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

How can I install Exchange 2010 SP2 onto SBS 2011 Standard

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Microsoft a few months back now, released Exchange 2010 SP2 and it can of course be applied to SBS 2011 Standard servers.  You first need to obtain the download here and save it to your server.

Make sure you have logged onto your server using your Network Administrator or Domain Admin account first.

I always do a quick backup of the server before I continue – that way I can be sure that I’ve got a server to return to if the upgrade fails for whatever reason.

Run the download and extract it to the location that you want to run it from and then run the Setup.exe file.

image

Select Install Microsoft Exchange Server Upgrade

image

This launches the Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 installation process.

image

Accept the license agreement and Next ton continue.

image

 

image

If does a number of system checks including disk space. Lucky for me as I didn’t realise that my disk space was so low on this server and it gave me a chance to clean it up a bit.

image

Once I cleared up my disk space, i was able to proceed with the upgrade.

image

The entire process (aside from cleaning up disk space) took 23 minutes to do and was the most painless process I’ve done in a long time.

My system did not need a reboot, but as a matter of principle, I performed one.  Once the server was back up again, I then tested Exchange, OWA, ActiveSync to ensure all was working before re-enabling my backups.

I hope your upgrade process is as simple as mine was.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in FAQs | 5 Comments »

How to create an anonymous relay on Exchange 2010 or SBS 2011 Standard

Friday, December 9th, 2011

I’ve had to do this a few times now for applications that require anonymous relay in order to send email.  Whenever I do this I limit the scope of the anonymous relay to the application server in question.  Below I’ve given the PowerShell commands that can be used on SBS 2011 Standard or Exchange 2010 to correctly create an anonymous relay for any traffic coming from the application server with the IP of 192.168.1.3.

The process needs to be done in two steps – first command line will create the Anonymous Relay connector and the second like will modify the permissions of it to allow it to function correctly.

New-ReceiveConnector -Name "Application Anonymous Relay" -Usage Custom -PermissionGroups AnonymousUsers -Bindings 192.168.16.2:25 -RemoteIpRanges 192.168.16.3

Get-ReceiveConnector "Application Anonymous Relay" | Add-ADPermission -User "NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON" -ExtendedRights "Ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient"

Creating the Receive Connector via the Exchange System Manager is not enough – if you have done just that, then you also need to run the 2nd PowerShell command below for it to work.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in FAQs | 1 Comment »

How can I tell what Exchange Version I have?

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

I stumbled across this gem last week and thought I’d share it with you.  Using the tables listed here you can figure out what version of Exchange Server you are running.

You can use the Get-ExchangeServer powershell command to find the Exchange 2010 and 2007 versions, but you will need to use the GUI in Exchange 2003.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in FAQs | No Comments »

Object Not Found when moving mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Recently when doing an SBS 2003 to SBS 2011 Standard migration, I had an error of “Object not found” in the Local Move Request screen as you can see below.

image

I did some digging and found that the permissions on the SBS 2003 / Exchange 2003 mailbox store had been changed for some third party application. 

Too fix it do the following,

  1. Open Exchange System Manager on the Exchange 2003 server.
  2. Expand the nodes until you get to the First Administrative Group and then expand the Servers node.
  3. Right click on the Exchange 2003 / SBS 2003 server and select properties
  4. Go to the Security tab and select the Advanced Button
  5. Select to enable the “Allow inheritable permissions…” box as below
  6. image
  7. Then Select OK twice to apply the changes.
  8. Restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store on the Exchange 2003 / SBS 2003 server and re run the move request on the Exchange 2010 / SBS 2011 Standard server once again.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 Migration Tip – Moving Mailboxes

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

In previous versions of Exchange, the move mailbox process was a pretty “dumb” process.  You selected the mailboxes you wanted moved and then moved them either immediately or at a later time you selected.  You had to leave the console running for the process to run.

Exchange 2010 / SBS 2011 Standard changes all that now.  With the moving of mailboxes, when you select the mailboxes to move, you issue a Local Move Request for the selected mailboxes.  This then puts those mailboxes into a Move Request Queue which is a serviced by the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service.  This service then processes the mailboxes in the order that they were placed in the queue moving them from server to server.

The cool thing about this is that you can grab a group of mailboxes in whatever order you desire to move them in  a specific order.  For example, on a recent migration, I used the Exchange 2003 console to identify which mailboxes were below 500MB, and then I used the Exchange 2010 console to multi select those and process a Local Move Request against those mailboxes.  This started the move on those smaller mailboxes and I was able to then select all the larger mailboxes and add them to the Move Request queue.

I love it when Microsoft make cool improvements like this – makes our life as IT Professionals easier.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »

Exchange 2010 – RBAC Errors Part 2

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

I used the previous post yesterday here to resolve why I could not get into the Roles Based Access Control web page.  The reason I was trying to do that was to review where the service account was for this system as I was getting the error below.

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange RBAC
Date:          31/08/2011 9:56:43 AM
Event ID:      17
Task Category: RBAC
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      server.domain.local
Description:
(Process w3wp.exe, PID 11872) "RBAC authorization returns Access Denied for user domain.local/Users/BackupServiceAcct. Reason: No role assignments associated with the specified user were found on Domain Controller server.domain.local"

 

The solution is to ensure that you add the Service Account you are using for backup into the Exchange Organisation Administrators group.  You can do that using either the Roles Based Access Control tool in the Exchange 2010 console, or you can simply add them into the correct security group which I chose to do.

 

Symantec document this here if you want to read more.

Tags: ,
Posted in Blog | No Comments »