Martin Walter's questions

I'm trying to add a new account to Outlook but the wizard gives me an error:

Log onto Exchange ActiveSync Mail server (EAS): The server cannot be found. The username or password you entered isn't working.

I checked the settings and I am able to login to OWA without problems. Existing accounts are not affected and work fine in Outlook.

I can see no apparent problems in my Exchange server, but I also don't know where to look regarding this problem. I find it also curious that the error message mentions that it can't find the server as well as wrong credentials.

I already did a repair installation of Exchange CU12 last night without any effect.

I also tried the Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer to test Exchange ActiveSync. The test passed, with a warning that my LE certificate may only work with a Root Certificate Update.

I had to manually provide the server name, as there seems to be some problem with autodiscover. I get a 403 when accessing https://autodiscover.:443/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml with the Analyzer, but it works in my browser. I would like to solve that problem as well (if it is not the root cause).

I have a Windows Server 2019 file server (Hyper-V VM) that stops to work weekly. Every Monday morning share access isn't working. I can browse the server, but when I click on a share Explorer just times out.

I've tried restarting the service but that just hangs when I stop it. When I restart the server it also hangs, so I always have to reset it. There are no errors in the logs AFAIK.

This is the third time I've installed this instance without any luck.

I've always reused the same virtual disk where the data is stored, which has a ReFS file system with Deduplication enabled. Could that be a problem?

I found this thread in the Microsoft forums, but they did not find a solution either.

I work for a company of about 50 people. Our two servers (identical) are custom built with these specs:

Xeon E3-1270 V3
Intel Entry Server Board
32 GB DDR3 ECC
2x 256 GB SSD RAID1 (for System)
4x 1TB SSD RAID10 (for Hyper-V VMs)
Windows Server 2012 R2 as Host and VMs

Each server hosts two VMs (2x AD + file sharing + roaming profiles, 1x SQL server for testing, 1x other (not important).

We perform daily backups using the built in Windows Backup on iSCSI targets hosted on a QNAP NAS (2x 2TB RAID1).

The servers don't have a lot of load and we never had any problems. Most of our data is stored in the cloud (VS Online, SharePoint).

But I wonder if it's sensible continuing this setup or if it's better to switch to professional server hardware, namely one big machine.

So what are the pitfalls and what should I do about them?

A SBS 2008 server that I manage suddenly acts very strange. After a scheduled reboot I noticed that the server is almost unmanagable. Some services (e.g. Fax, RAS) can't be started, the services.msc is not responding (empty window, "Not responding" in the title), I can't start or shut down services using Task Manager (it tells me they're in the process of starting/shutting down but they never do). I suspect a recent Update, but since Windows Update is also a service I can't access that either to check. Same with Windows Backup. Rebooting the server also does not help (but takes forever, don't know if that was the case before). I noticed when logging off it always tells me it's installing updates (phase 3 of 3) so that's why I suspect a recent update. What's more strange is that file sharing and Exchange are working fine.

Any ideas?