Exchange Recovery

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

imadoofus

MB Enthusiast
Joined
May 16, 2005
Messages
2,859
Car
This and that.
Right then:

Exchange server's raid crashes (SCSI card goes belly-up), so server has to be rebuilt - reinstall Windows Server 2003, and Exchange 2003. Mailboxes are restored from tape, but because the guids have changed, each user has to delete their profile on their local machine, and then create a new one, and let it replicate from the server.

1) One user's machine won't replicate. It just says "Waiting to update this folder", and doesn't.

2) Nobody's rules work (the 'if an email from X come in, put it in X folder', or 'if an email with Y in the subject comes in, pu tit in Y folder'). Even deleting them and recreating them has no effect. If the email is internal the rule works, but if it's from an external source; no dice.

Any ideas, oh Great and Wise Ones?

TIA

PJ
 
First, I didn't do any of the recovery work. That was done by a third party IT support engineer. He had a 'funny turn' about 90% of the way throught he job, and has been off sick for the past three weeks.

He did exchange the SCSI controller, but the array had collapsed. He restored the Exchange information store from tape, and as far as that goes, there are no problems.

What I don't understand is, having created new profiles, why nobody's rules work.

If I've got to read a MS thingy, then I won't bother. I'm really not at all technical, and I had hoped it was an easy fix.

As Homer Simpson said, "If a thing's hard to do, it's not worth doing"

Thanks for your help :)

PJ
 
Despite the fact that your internal rules are still working it sounds like the server side is corrupted. You may need to use a tool like MDBVU32 to clean them out.

Thanks to Seamster for the E-E plug - you can actually get a free account (but lots of advertising) here.

Suggest you post a question in their Exchange Server forum.

Also check your rogue user's files aren't trying to update a personal folder

Edit: and that you have got Exchange patched up to the same Service Pack as you had before
 
Last edited:
I'm making the assumption that this is a single server that handles both Active Directory and Exchange (from the comment that the UUIDs of the users have changed).

On the backup there should, if it's been done correctly, be a backup of the Active Directory state. This should have been restored by the contractors to restore the users, rather than recreating them; thereby keeping their UUIDs and rules intact.

With regard to the rules, make sure that the SMTP service is set up, along with all the users "proxy" addresses, aka SMTP aliases. There's a few utilities on the M$ web site that handle Exchange Server recovery, I could ask our Exchange administrator at work to hook out the URLs if you wanted them.

A corrupt log file / partition or metadata files could break the rules in the manner you describe. One of the utilities on the M$ web site that I've seen and used before runs consistency checks on these files and repairs them if it can.

I'm not a big Exchange advocate myself; however have installed and maintained a couple of small development instances, one of which I managed to completely trash and rebuild.

HTH, Andy.
 
As I suspected; it's way beyond me.

As I suggested, they're going to have to pay a professional to fix it for them.

Thanks, all.

PJ
 
Sure thats sounds your best bet. It very easy to brake it but it CAN be very difficult to fix it.

I'm fully retired from M$ since last year, know that M$ shop since their copy of CPM they call it MS-DOS...
 
agatward said:
I'm not a big Exchange advocate myself; however have installed and maintained a couple of small development instances, one of which I managed to completely trash and rebuild.
Not sure if you meant this, but what would you consider instead of Exchange?
 
Last edited:
Rory said:
Not sure if you meant this, but what would you consider instead of Exchange?
Domino :D
 
Rory said:
Not sure if you meant this, but what would you consider instead of Exchange?
Interesting you ask this question as we're just about to commence an internal review at work before we take the final decision on whether to migrate all our academic staff on to Exchange. We've hit quite a number of issues in testing.

Other solutions include:
  • OpenExchange
  • Domino
  • Lotus Notes (or whatever it is nowadays)
  • An in-house solution based on Exim and Cyrus, with phpGroupWare for calendars
  • Probably some others too
Enjoy. :)
 
agatward said:
Interesting you ask this question as we're just about to commence an internal review at work before we take the final decision on whether to migrate all our academic staff on to Exchange. We've hit quite a number of issues in testing.

Other solutions include:
  • OpenExchange
  • Domino
  • Lotus Notes (or whatever it is nowadays)
  • An in-house solution based on Exim and Cyrus, with phpGroupWare for calendars
  • Probably some others too
Enjoy. :)
Notes/Domino are the same thing. Domino is the server, Notes is the client.
 
Shude said:
Notes/Domino are the same thing. Domino is the server, Notes is the client.

As I said... "whatever it is nowadays". ;) I forgot that IBM and Lotus merged.

I'm a networking guy but also get to do some [security] software developent, I avoid user-facing applications if I can but sometimes have to get my hands dirty or at least understand what the frigging thing's trying to do to my network, which in the case of a lot of M$ things always leaves me scratching my head and asking "why?" :eek:
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom