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Exchange Woes


matthew.brough

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I assume most here now mainly use cloud deployments of exchange however just in case there are any of you that use on premise and have a redundant site I thought I would share with you what can only be described as the weekend from hell.

 

We have 2 exchange servers, 1 on site A and 1 on site B. It hasn't been uncommon in the past that without warning, emails just stop appearing. This is usually down to the 2 servers stopping talking (for no reason) and  a restart of both and it processes the missing emails.

 

The same happened yesterday morning, but the usual restart did nothing. I got error after error sending on all sorts of wild goose chases. Database's wouldn't mount, they would be out of sync, certificate errors, services set to auto wouldn't start, started services couldn't be stopped. You name it, it errored. No matter what I tried it just would not work. Comms between the 2 sites perfect and all other replications working a treat as normal.

 

Whilst searching pages and pages of forums I noticed hidden in one complain that MTU had caused a similar issue which lit a bulb in my head. Site A is leased line, high end Cisco routers etc etc but site B is just plain old vdsl and the PPPOE session created by the firewall. Due to issues with Dualcom, I have had to put a Draytek 2860 to managed the VDSL connection so that I can add a Cisco 5505 to mange the connection to CSL and the existing firewall do the rest. I did this on Friday with no problems but it put the idea in my head that these issues had only occurred since this work had been done although it worked fine for 24 hours in this setup and comms down the tunnel were fine.

 

Dissed the Draytek and made the current firewall manage PPPOE as it had done before and all these pages of errors disappeared. I am going to see if this is an MTU issue or if the IPSEC doesn't like it and try Open VPN to see what the root error was.

 

For alarm notifications and support emails these don't touch Exchange due to previous strops it throws with anything non Microsoft so we use a very reliable, simple email program called MDaemon for that. Ironic that the reliable solution costs a tenth of Exchange.

 

An unusual problem that has caused me some serious migraines this weekend so though I would share in case anyone else has the unfortunate job of administering Exchange.


All healthy now :)

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www.securitywarehouse.co.uk/catalog/

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Cloud based exchange..  I wouldn't have a clue with a server..

Keep it that way :)

 

Exchange is an extremely powerful piece of software and has awesome compatibility with the rest of the Windows Server System however it is very expensive, very hard to manage and when it goes wrong, it goes major wrong. The only reason we don't have cloud is I don't want my data somewhere I don't know where it is or who has access to it. If it wasn't for that, we would be cloud tomorrow.

www.securitywarehouse.co.uk/catalog/

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We had been running exchange 2003 for years, we moved to cloud about 4 months ago. We now have one less machine running in the office.

 

We're obviously small compared to a lot on here but I'm in the process of sorting out our small IT system.  Currently running 2 tower PC's, a NAS and an old laptop as UDL server.  Just received a new Dell AIO (thanks to Jef recommendation) and will replace our other PC at some point with another one of these.  We are just about to run some CAT6's into the office for our 2 PoE phones and WAP.  Then remote from Office in a cab we'll have the NAS, UDL server, PoE switch & router on UPS.  All email is cloud based exchange.  It works OK as it is but the new setup will be more compact, quicker, cheaper to run and hopefully more efficient.  

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apart from a grandstream handset there nothing changed on our IT for ages,

Tower SBS 2003 in cab, Xp desktops HP switch, cisco router

I also have 1 asus vesa mount PC which has been been unused on the back of a mon for a yr, don't like the idea of all AIO pc's

Mr? Veritas God

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 don't like the idea of all AIO pc's

 

That's why I bought Dell with extra warranties blah blah..  Next day on site fix.  Since we started in 2008 we've always bought Dell except one laptop which was HP.  Will always buy Dell from now on..

 

It's a cracking bit of kit

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apart from a grandstream handset there nothing changed on our IT for ages,

Tower SBS 2003 in cab, Xp desktops HP switch, cisco router

I also have 1 asus vesa mount PC which has been been unused on the back of a mon for a yr, don't like the idea of all AIO pc's

:no:

Not a high tech junkie, are you Dave?

We went from 2003 - 2008 now 2012

Edited by matthew.brough

www.securitywarehouse.co.uk/catalog/

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changing stuff takes a lot of time,

Don't have the time or VC money to burn,

Have loads of stuff I want to tweak but suspect there little change happening any time soon ?

Enough things change on pooters and networks without any added interventions.

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changing stuff takes a lot of time,Don't have the time or VC money to burn,Have loads of stuff I want to tweak but suspect there little change happening any time soon ?

There have been some significant improvements between the versions, especially in virtualisation and server management but a single server, single site environment I must confess not much benefit

www.securitywarehouse.co.uk/catalog/

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