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

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

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

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

One of the frequent challenges I have faced as an email administrator is trying to troubleshoot a system from the outside. That is to say, while I am viewing the system from the inside, and have administrative rights to it, the problem I am working on may be related to something outside my control, and I have limited visibility into what is happening from the perspective of other systems. It can be just as important to know how other mail systems interact with your systems and to see this from the outside perspective as it is to review your own logs. Unless I had access to another email system, my Gmail account was my best, albeit limited, resource to use for testing.

Fortunately, I have found several online resources through the years to help with setting up, testing, and troubleshooting email systems. The following fourteen are those that I have found to be the most useful. Some are single purpose, others have lots of great tools. Together, they let me validate/test just about any aspect of my email system, both from a server perspective, and from a client’s. This post will divide them up into categories for their best use, provide links, and share a little about what you can use these for and what to expect.

Continue reading 14 online resources for email admins

In a blog written by Kentc, the author has brought up the subject of Outlook Connectors and their role in allowing email users to synchronize their personal email tools with Outlook. It can be used to synchronize an end-users’ email, calendar, and contacts with Outlook using a technology called DeltaSync.

The Wikipedia definition for DeltaSync is listed as follows:

“DeltaSync is a proprietary Microsoft communications protocol for synchronizing web services with offline clients.[1] Windows Live Hotmail is exposed to offline clients using DeltaSync, and Outlook Connector and the Windows Live Mail client use it for offline access. Microsoft is pushing for this protocol instead of POP3 or IMAP4 for supporting various advanced features like contacts, calendar, notes synchronizing. Using the DeltaSync protocol, Microsoft intends to provide a common platform for any compatible device to implement a client which can two-way synchronize mail, contacts, calendar and notes.”

Kentc has written that many users would like to be able to easily respond to emails from their Outlook application but at the same time indicate that the email they are sending is coming from a personal email application such as Hotmail.
I think that it’s great to have that kind of flexibility but the downside is that it makes it easier for users to be able to slip into spending time on personal email matters at work when they are being paid by their employer for time spent working on matters related to the employers’ business rather than on personal email matters.

Be that as it may, from a pure technology perspective I can definitely get excited about the pure technology and work involved in writing a software tool such as an Outlook Connector.

Continue reading The Outlook Connector Advantage

A major factor in moving from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2003 was the advantage of utilizing RPC calls to make connections from Outlook clients to an Exchange server. The specific technology for making these internet connections was RPC over HTTP.  RPC means remote procedure calls and allow your Outlook MAPI clients to connect to Exchange servers using HTTP or the secure HTTPS protocol.

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a protocol that one application can use to request a service from another application running in another system in a network without having to understand network details. Remote Procedure Calls uses the client/server model. The requesting application is a client and the application which supplies the service is the server component. Remote Procedure Calls are synchronous operations that require the requesting application to wait until the results of the remote procedure are returned from the server. The uses of lightweight processes or threads that share the same address space allow multiple Remote Procedure Calls to be performed concurrently.

One of the advantages of using RPC over HTTP is that this methodology can support secure connections to the Exchange server and thus add an additional layer of security between the client and the server.

The other benefit is that these RPC commands could be encapsulated in HTTP. What this means from an administrator perspective is that only one of two ports would need to be opened at the firewall – port 443 or port 80 – as opposed to earlier versions which would have required two additional ports: port 135 and port 53. These ports were well known to hackers and used by them to create havoc within many organizations on a routine basis.

Continue reading Troubleshooting Connections to Exchange Server using HTTP