Daily IT Matters [DIM]

Friday, normally a very quiet day, today was going to be different than I had anticipated. I got in the in office and overheard a collegue, talking with a sysadmin from a subdivision about an exchange server. Damn I knew it immediately it was the one from yesterday that wend down 30 times in 12 hours. They had replaced the systemboard, and where now knocking on our doors for help because the Mailbox database wouldn't mount, and before I even got a cup of coffee I was on the phone and started the rdp session to the server. Our exchange environment consists of about 135 exchange 2003 servers. But the one I now needed to rdp to I knew the hostname already. On the phone with the sysadmin I started the needed actions, and I've written them down so it maybe helps someone in the future. This article explains all the steps you need to take to be a bring a exchange 2003 mailbox store that is in a "Dirty" Shutdown state back to life. Actions performed for exchange 200...

If you are facing the task of demoting your domain controller running exchange, because you either have a new dc added to your network and want to move some roles over to that brand new sparkling server. Then you cannot do a dcpromo /demote on the exchange server! This will cause havoc. What you must do is: Add another Exchange server to your network move the mailboxes over and deinstall exchange on the DC. Then do a dcpromo /demote reinstall exchange move mailboxes over again. This is the way with the shortest downtime

Like most Windows products released in 2003, Exchange Server 2003 offers more manageability through Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). As Table 1 ( http://www.winnetmag.com/microsoftexchangeoutlook , InstantDoc ID 40755) shows, Exchange 2000 Server was the first release in which Microsoft implemented WMI interfaces for Exchange. The original release offered three WMI providers: ExchangeRoutingTableProvider, ExchangeQueueProvider, and ExchangeClusterProvider. These providers are available from the Root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange namespace. Later, Microsoft released Exchange 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2), which introduced two new WMI providers in the Root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 namespace: ExchangeDsAccessProvider and ExchangeMessageTrackingProvider. Little difference exists between the five providers in Exchange 2000 SP2 and those same five providers in Exchange 2003. The only noticeable change is that Microsoft updated the ExchangeMessageTrackingProvider's Exchange_MessageTracking...