I upgraded a client’s CAS servers recently from Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2 Update Rollup 5 to Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 13 in preparation for upgrade to Exchange 2013. Following the restart after the Update Rollup had completed I found I could not log into OWA. Instead I got a blank page with a… Read More »
When you install a new version of Exchange or apply a Cumulative Update certain AD attributes are updated to reflect the change. The updates are made in three different directory partitions (also known as naming contexts): Schema, Configuration and Domain. The following Microsoft TechNet article is a good reference for the different versions and the… Read More »
I had an interesting one recently when submitting a certificate request to a Windows Certificate Authority using certreq.exe. The error that came back was: The disposition message is “Error Parsing Request The request subject name is invalid or too long. 0x80094001 (-2146877439)” I found several links to possible solutions but, as it turns out, the problem in… Read More »
I’ve had my Lenovo Ideapad Yoga 13 for a little over a year now. Generally, I’m very happy with it. It has two internal SSDs, 8GB RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor. Windows 8.1 runs very nicely on it. I use the Ideapad for my day-to-day work as well as running test labs in… Read More »
Despite Active Directory having been around for more than 10 years, I still find new implementations proceeding without directory service access auditing enabled. For me, auditing of who does what, where and when in your directory is crucial information. I can’t fully fathom why Microsoft doesn’t have it enabled with some sensible defaults out of the… Read More »
I helped a customer out with a problem recently. They had been running Windows Server Backup on an Exchange 2013 CU3 server. The backups had been configured to “VSS Full” and the scheduled jobs were showing as completing successfully. The only issue was that the mailbox database transaction logs were not be deleted/removed by the… Read More »
I fell foul of this one the other day and it took a while to figure out what to do about it. Here’s the scenario: You deploy a new Group Policy Preferences (GPP) setting to create a folder on a workstation and specify the “Apply once and do not reapply” option. Unsurprisingly, this implies the… Read More »
I had a requirement recently to try and find out where and when a whole lot of mailboxes were hidden from the GAL. Yes, fingering some poor sucker for the blame is an immensely satisfying task, isn’t it? I’ve found that an effective way to do this is to query the AD replication metadata for… Read More »
Reading the post title you maybe wondering whether I’ve taken leave of my senses. Why call Robocopy from Powershell to count files when Powershell has a perfectly good method of doing this natively? For example, (Get-ChildItem e:\powershell -Recurse -force | ?{! $_.PSIsContainer} | Measure-Object).count Well, the problem comes in when an individual file length exceeds 260… Read More »
Another short blog posting (brevity is obviously my thing for 2014). I occasionally come across environments in which Strict Replication Consistency is not enabled. This is invariably because these environment have forests that were created with Windows 2000 server, but which have subsequently been upgraded. If you need to know more about Strict Replication Consitency… Read More »