ThinkerIV's questions

A strange problem recently developed with one of my Exchange 2010 servers. I have an exchange server setup as part of a Windows Small Business Server 2011 installation. The email for the domain was working perfectly for 4 or 5 months, and now with no change in configuration is having problems.

The inbound email still works great, but when an email is sent it occasionally bounces back with one of several error messages. It doesn't happen to all of the sent emails, just some of them. It appears as though mail sent to certain domains will always bounce, including mail sent to domains that used to work. It also seems like the error message is generated by the recipients receiving server. Here are some of the error messages that bounce back:

host123.SomeEmailHost.com rejected your message to the following e-mail addresses: Someone LastName ([email protected])

host123.SomeEmailHost.com gave this error: Verification failed for The mail server could not deliver mail to [email protected]. The account or domain may not exist, they may be blacklisted, or missing the proper dns entries. Sender verify failed

A problem occurred during the delivery of this message to this e-mail address. Try sending this message again. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk.

Here is another message received when sending to a different domain:

mail12.anotherhost.com rejected your message to the following e-mail addresses: someoneelse lastname ([email protected])

([email protected]) mail12.anotherhost.com gave this error: sorry, that address is not in my list of allowed recipients; no valid cert for gatewaying (#5.7.1)

A problem occurred during the delivery of this message to this e-mail address. Try sending this message again. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk.

I have tried researching these errors, but have not turned up anything that seems applicable to my server. Is it some sort of certificate error. I am using a self signed certificate on the server. If that is the problem, why did it just now start being a problem?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

I have a rather bad problem with my Windows SBS 2011. First of all, I'll give the background to what caused the problem. I was setting up a new small business server network. I had my job about finished. The server was working great, all the workstations had joined the domain, and I had all my applications and data moved to the server. I thought I was done. But then it happened. I tried adding one more computer to the domain, and to my dismay the computer name was set to the same name as the server.

Apparently when a computer joins a domain with the same name as another machine that is already on the domain, it overrides the first one. For normal workstations, this is not a big deal, you just delete the computer from AD and rejoin the original computer to the domain. However, for a server that is the domain controller it is a whole different story. Since the server got overridden in AD, it is no longer the domain controller. The DNS service is not working and all kinds of other services are failing also.

So the question is, what are my options? I am embarrassed to admit it, but since this is a new server one thing I did not have setup yet was backup. So I have no backups to work from. I am worried that things are broken enough that I might need to do a reinstall. However, I already have several days worth of configuration into this server, so I would obviously prefer if there was a fix that would prevent me from needing to do a reinstall. All the server components are there and installed correctly, but they are misconfigured (I think it is basically just Active Directory). So I have the feeling that if I did the right thing I could solve the issue without a reinstall. Is there anyway to rerun the component that installs the initial configuration to "convert" the base windows server 2008 r2 install into a SBS? In other words in the program files folder there is an application called SBSsetup.exe, is there anyway to rerun this and have it reconfigure AD, etc. to work with SBS?

Any insight will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I am administering a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment that is using roaming profiles and folder redirection. The client machines are running Windows 7. Due to the nature of the business, users rarely logoff and frequently have logons on multiple machines at once. This obviously creates a lot of problems with "last writer wins" conflicts and each session overwriting changes made in another session.

I have tried different methods to reduce the conflicts, but still do not have a satisfactory solution. I am using the new feature of background uploading of user profiles, but as this article explains that really does not solve the problem: http://blogs.sepago.de/helge/2009/04/02/microsoft-tackles-the-last-writer-wins-problem-of-roaming-profiles-in-windows-7-server-2008-r2/. I have also ran a few trials of third party software such as ProfileUnity, but still had some issues with that. And of course I suggested that users could just be more conscientious about logging off when they leave their computer and before they start a new session. But management said that that just will not happen and will not work for our environment.

So the question is, do any of you have experience with this issue? Do you know of any settings or third party apps that at least minimize the conflicts even if it does not eliminate them? Is there any way to make it so that the computer does a periodic logoff and log back on that is transparent to the user?