Aaron's questions

Two Dell server each running Windows 2008 R2 both using the Broadcom onboard NICs. Both servers were setup using the Broadcom wizard to Team the NICs with LACP protocol. The switch is a Dell 5548, both sets of NICs are in their own LAG on the switch, with the LACP protocol on for the Lag.

Summary, when transferring Data between the two servers, I see 100-110 MB/s per second, and when looking at the Network Utilization under Task Manager, I see the 2 Gbps network link at 47-49% utilization.

Do I have something configured wrong? Should I be seeing 80-90% Network Utilization and 175-200 MB/s transfer speed, or am I misunderstanding the concept of Teaming?

I have a strange issue:

We have two DNS servers, both are Windows 2003 SP2. The only difference between the two is they have seperate gateways to the internet. One goes out through a cable modem, the other goes out through a 10MB metro-ethernet service.

Both servers appear to work fine, having no issues, all clients are able to resolve internal and external DNS querries, with one exception. When doing an nslookup on the first server, I receive a timeout messgae for one and only one particular domain. The other server doesn't not receive a timeout for that same domain, it works fine.

When looking at the domain in question, I see no issues, I'm able to ping it from other computers outside my network, etc. How can I troubleshoot the reason for this particular domain lookup failing on only this DNS server?

Things I've done so far: 1. Reset the cache on both server. 2. Restart both servers 3. Turn debugging on, but nothing is showing up in the logs.

I'm looking for feedback from anyone who is using a NETapp filer, with Snap Manager for Exchange. We plan to install one and the consultant has told us that our current virtual server running exchange 2003 can stay virtual, but the drives containing the log files and the exchange information store need to be move outside of vmware, i.e. can't be stored inside an vdmk file.

My understanding is the log and information store will need to be stored on separate LUNs in the filer and the virtual machine will mount these LUNs.

My question: I've looked through all of Netapp's best practices and I haven't found a similar setup. I believe the consultant, but I would be interested in additional confirmation that this is the prefered setup, or a best practices guide.

Thanks

We have a front end MS Exchange 2003 Server and recently people started complaining that emails weren't being delivered. Upon looking closer at the logs we found this error message:

>     Event Type:   Error
>     Event Source: Service Control Manager
>     Event Category:   None
>     Event ID: 7031
>     Date:     6/4/2009
>     Time:     11:08:00 AM
>     User:     N/A
>     Computer: <Server>
>     Description:
>     The IIS Admin Service service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done
>     this 39 time(s).  The following
>     corrective action will be taken in 1
>     milliseconds: Run the configured
>     recovery program.

We found MS KB article Q304166 and were able to determine which message in the Exchsrvr\Mailroot\vsi 1 folder was causing the problem by removing them one at a time and restarting the services.

The email that was causing all this havoc was a 200K PDF file that was emailed to 3,500 addresses. Why would exchange be crippled so badly? I realize 3500 is a large number of people to email but I would have guessed that the SMTP server would have throttled the connections and slowly sent out this email over the evening or even a couple days.

My question:

Is there a way in Exchange to determine maximum SMTP load? Have others seen this same reaction, or should we be looking for a misconfiguration on the server?

When/if we need to send to a large group again, is there a way to gauge how much the server can handle in one batch, or do I need to user Perfmon and just start testing to see how it handles 100,250,400, etc?

I installed Windows 7 RC 1 from a usb flash drive using these directions. The installation went well, however when I log into the laptop I'm getting the error message:

"There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive \Device\Harddisk3\DR3"

I've put the thumb drive back in thinking it needed to finish the installation, but that hasn't changed anything.

Any ideas?

We're getting the following Error when emailing a client.

There was a SMTP communication problem with the recipient's email server.  Please contact your system administrator.
            <mail.ourdomain.com #5.5.0 smtp;553 mailbox [email protected] is restricted (Mode: normal)>

The SMTP logs aren't much better:

OutboundConnectionResponse SMTPSVC1 ourserver - 25 - 553+mailbox+jwxxx@theirdomain+is+restricted+(Mode:+normal) 0 0 67 0 265 SMTP - - - -

OutboundConnectionCommand SMTPSVC1 ourserver - 25 RSET - - 0 0 4 0 265 SMTP - - - -

I believe the error is on their end, but I was curious what the 'is restricted' error message meant. I haven't seen that before, and quick google search didn't return and concrete answers.

Using Exchange 2003, Outlook 2003.

The user’s mailbox is stored on the server, and everything appears to be working fine. The inbox and all sub folders are accessible. The problem presents itself when the user’s mailbox is exported to a PST. Outlook gives the message ‘Operation failed’. Loading exmerge on the exchange server, a PST file is created, but exmerge and outlook tell me the PST is corrupt. ScanPST also reports the PST from exmerge is corrupt.

I’m thinking about manually creating a PST in Outlook, and then manually copying the contents into the PST. Before I do, does anyone know of a way to scan a Mailbox to find and remove the corrupted items which I assume is the issue.

Background: 1. I’d prefer not to do any low level eseutils commands on the store. 2. This is part of a DR scenario, which is why I’m trying export the data to a PST file.

We're running VMware Server 2.0 as the host, and Windows 2003 as the guest. We started getting the error message below. From some quick searching it appears that we probably have a corrupt vmdk file. Any suggestions on tools to check the consistency or repair the vmdk file?

Message from server-1001.domain.com: Operation on file "F:\Virtual Machines\ati-ntserver1\Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition-3.vmdk" failed.
If the file resides on a remote file system, please make sure your network connection and the server where this disk resides are functioning properly. If the file resides on removable media, reattach the media.
Choose Retry to attempt the operation again.
Choose Abort to terminate this session.
Choose Continue to forward the error to the guest operating system.

The is not on a remote file system or removable media. Pressing continue on the Guest will continue for a couple hours but then the error comes back.