Using the Microsoft Exchange Replication service can sometimes mean that administrators must determine which occasional errors to fix later and which errors need correction as soon as possible.

Administrators will usually have the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager (MOM) running which can relieve them of constantly having to monitor the Windows Application log on systems that run Exchange Server 2007.

If the following event or events are logged in the Details table then the Management Operations Manager will generate an alert such as: ‘A directory required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service does not exist.”

The event which causes this alert is as follows:

Product Name:    Exchange
Product Version:    8.0 (Exchange Server 2007)
Event ID:        2074
Event Source:        MSExchangeRepl
Alert Type:        Error
MOM Rule Path:    Microsoft Exchange Server/Exchange 2007/Mailbox/Continuous Replication
MOM Rule Name:    A directory required by the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service does not exist.

When this event occurs it means that the Microsoft Exchange Replication (MSExchangeRepl) service could not access the required directory for the source logs, the target logs, or the checkpoint file or could not access the “targetsystemdirectory”. The event can occur if there is a permission issue on the directory, a hardware failure, or a configuration failure. If an administrator has misconfigured the system to use a particular volume and then removed the volume that the configuration points to then the event ID 2074 may be generated. Replication will fail for the respective storage group. Once the misconfiguration has been corrected then an administrator can successfully resume the replication.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Error 2074

Microsoft introduced its first analyzer tool for Exchange in 2004. Called by the catchy title Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer, the software proved to be so successful that similar software was rolled out for troubleshooting other aspects of Exchange.

Best Practices Analyzer emerged after Microsoft observed certain patterns when addressing critical situations with its support services. Critical situations require urgent assistance to solve a problem that’s disrupting service to an organization’s members and its important business operations. What Microsoft found was that not only were the number of critical situations growing, but that 60 percent of them were caused by configuration errors, not bugs in Exchange. Moreover, new critical situations arising in some shops were the same ones that had emerged in other organizations just a few months earlier.

Microsoft began by creating a utility to gather key information throughout an Exchange environment. When a customer faced a critical situation, they were told to run the utility and Microsoft would sift through the data to ferret out the root cause of a problem.

Collecting data was only the first step. Next, an engine was developed that could analyze the data and expose it to a set of rules. The rules established thresholds. If a key data item was outside the acceptable range in a threshold, the rule would “fire” and a red flag would be raised for support folks.

Continue reading Use Microsoft’s analyzing tools to keep Exchange humming

Outlook 2010 includes some great, though rather less than obvious, troubleshooting capabilities. You can enable diagnostic logging from within advanced options of Outlook, and hidden within the application’s system tray icon is the option to test email auto-configuration as well as to determine what messages are displayed to the user.

Enabling this logging, and testing connections, are both great ways to diagnose connection issues and to determine whether any connection problems are on the client side, or the server side. If you’d like to learn more, please read on.

Enabling diagnostic logging cranks up the data generated by Outlook to 11, so it is not the sort of thing we want to just do and leave turned on. If you have a client with connection issues, it is the best way to generate detailed logs of what is going on between the client and the server. When this logging is enabled, Outlook will display a message in the title bar, and lots of disk activity will occur. Continue reading Troubleshooting Outlook 2010 connections

Some of the new features of Exchange Server 2010 are that of the inclusion of two Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Writers: the Replication Writer and the Store Writer. These writers make it easier for backup applications to create Windows Server 2008 VSS snapshots. For databases, Exchange Server includes the Replication Writer for replicating databases using the Database Mobility Features. And for those databases that are not replicated using a Database Availability Group (DAG) there is the Store Writer.

The Replication Writer is built into the Replication Service and is available on the passive node of the DAG server. The Replication Writer is used to support backing up particular databases that have had a shadow copy taken of the replicated instance of the transaction log files and of the replicated instance. By using the Store Writer, backups taken by Replication Writer can be restored to the active database location.

The Store Writer is built into the Exchange store and is available on any mailbox server. Store Writer is used for backing up and restoring active databases.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Exchange Replication Service Errors

The most common question I have received as a result of this post on mail server misconfigurations is “how do I change my SMTP banner?” This article will tell you how to do so on several common mail server platforms. But first, let’s discuss why you want to.

Bad guys frequently use banner grabbing techniques as a part of the initial recon. It is a fairly innocuous activity that takes advantage of expected behaviours. To determine the type and version of mail server you are using, a bad guy need only connect to it on port 25, just like any other system would that is trying to send an email to one of your clients. IPS/IDS systems won’t alert on this, since to them it looks just like any other mail server trying to send mail, and unless you review every single log item, you probably won’t notice a connection that doesn’t actually send an email.

If, however, your SMTP does not reveal its version, all the bad guy knows is that he connected to your mail server. He is going to have to work a lot harder to identify your server, and that may be enough to trip an IDS/IPS alarm. Or, he may simply move on to easier pickings. Either way, make him work for it…don’t just give up all the information in your banner. Intrigued? Read on to learn how to change the SMTP banner on several popular mail server platforms.

Continue reading How to change your SMTP banner for fun and profit

In most all companies the sending and receiving of email messages happens almost all the time particularly between the hours of 8 to 5 for typical usages. But as administrators and managers know very well email is constantly being routed, sitting in queues and waiting to be read.

Sometimes while on conference calls I will not only be conversing on the conference call but at the same time be instant messaging with 2 to 4 colleagues as well as sending and receiving text and email messages – at least during times when I am not speaking on the call.

And like most all other users I have often had the experience of telling someone that “I’m going to send you that email right now with the attached document we spoke of.” I immediately create the email message and then hit the send button and watch as my screen changes to indicate that the message has been sent. Usually I get confirmation back from the recipient while I am talking with them on the phone that they have received my email message in what seemed like only seconds for the them to receive it.

But occasionally I will send an email with the recipient standing by on the phone with me and they will not receive for minutes and sometimes longer. This can be a very frustrating experience for people especially when their working relationships are co-dependent – the other person can’t start their work until they have received a certain email from their fellow co-worker.

Continue reading Top 5 Reasons for Email Delays

Virtual servers can benefit an organization’s data crunching needs in many ways. One of them is leveraging their native benefits to broaden the availability and recovery options for Microsoft Exchange 2010 deployments.

Most administrators can cite the benefits of virtual machines by rote:

* They’re portable so Exchange need no longer be bound to a particular piece of hardware. That means design decisions don’t need to be permanent. CPU and memory requirements can be changed with a reconfiguration and reboot. What’s more, new hardware can be be more easily accommodated because the virtual machine containing Exchange can be simply transferred to the new machine.

* They’re hardware independent so planners have greater design flexibility putting together the production as well as the disaster recovery components of a system.

Some virtual machine vendors, like VMware, have included robust availability features into their software. For example, the company’s High Availability product can act as a first line of defense against server failure. If a physical server or any critical component in a server goes down or fails, HA will automatically reboot the Exchange virtual machine on another physical server.

Continue reading Availability and recovery options when running Exchange 2010 in a virtual environment

With the many email tools that users have available to them they are bound to run into problems and compatibility issues at one time or another. One of the activities that many email users employ is the ability to read their emails from outside clients other than Outlook. But when it comes to synchronizing your outside email accounts while at the same running Outlook then issues can arise.

Some email applications only support POP3 access to their end users email folders. While POP3 access from the outside will allow users the ability to read their email messages in an offline mode from other clients such as Outlook, that capability does not extend to being able to synchronize their external email with Outlook. Thus an end user can spend a lot of time performing a manual synchronization which can be a laborious process.

If employees within your company need to access their email from external sources other than Outlook then they can download their external email into Microsoft Outlook and read their email messages. Likewise, end users can delete those messages while running Outlook but those deleted messages will not show up as deleted within their external email applications.

Users can get around these constraints by running versions of their external email applications that support the IMAP protocol which will allow them to read and delete email messages via Outlook and have those read and delete actions reflected within their external email applications.

Continue reading 10 Tools for Synchronizing Outlook Email

Whether you admin Exchange, Sendmail, MailEnable, Lotus Notes, or any other Internet email system, there are certain things that all these systems have in common. There are certain configurations that must be supported, and others that must not be, which newly live systems often miss. Whether you are an experienced admin, or  relatively new to the world of email, the seven deadly sins of mail server misconfiguration can pop up and bite you. Take heed, and check your systems to ensure you are good to go. Failing to do so can result in very bad things, like being added to DNS Blacklists.

Continue reading 7 Deadly Sins of Mail Server Misconfigurations

Performance monitoring is a subject that is discussed frequently in IT departments. It is discussed before servers and applications are purchased, it is discussed while the servers are in the pre-production phase and it is discussed many times after the servers have gone into production.

If the server crashes then forensic analysis is performed to pinpoint the cause of the crash. Sometimes the cause of the crash can be traced back to the exhaustion of resources. But hopefully, with diligent monitoring of the server performance, those scenarios can be detected early as resource consumption ramps up the curve of utilization over time.

Luckily for administrators of Exchange Server there are many tools to help with the monitoring of Exchange Server.

In Doug Gowan’s blog, he has written a very informative guide to monitoring performance of the Exchange Server and has given an excellent overview of what components to monitor. In his blog, Doug discusses such components of the Exchange Server as: RPC operations, DSAccess, memory usage, disk usage and processor utilization.

Continue reading Monitoring Performance of Exchange Server