erictheavg's questions

so I have Exchange 2010 and I'm having issues with Outlook Anywhere, and when I run testconnectivity.microsoft.com, it returns:

"The Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer wasn't able to validate Outlook Autodiscover settings...No account settings were returned from the Autodiscover response".

So I think the problem is that my Autodiscover is faulty. This is supported by scrolling up in the results and seeing that the xml response returns an IMAP server and an SMTP server that don't exist, both called "server.myinternaldomain.com.". It literally starts with "server". Obviously, I've never called a server "server" before so I have no idea where it would get that from. It's also nowhere in my public or private DNS settings, or in any of my Exchange settings as far as I can tell. I've looked in the following places:

• Get-OutlookProvider | fl
• Get-OutlookAnywhere | fl
• Get-ClientAccessServer | fl
• Get-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory | fl
• Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory | fl
• Get-EcpVirtualDirectory | fl
• Get-OabVirtualDirectory | fl
• Get-OwaVirtualDirectory | fl
• Get-WebServicesVirtualDirectory | fl

None of them show "server.myinternaldomain.com" anywhere. For the record, the mail server is called smtp.mydomain.com externally and exch.myinternaldomain.com internally.

Is there a way to change this value in the autodiscover.xml result? I've rebuilt the Autodiscover virtual directory to no avail.

Update: Well, I figured it out. A certificate was installed using Symantec SSL Assistant Plus. The problem was it wasn't the right certificate for the Exchange server, because it wasn't a SAN certificate. Also there already is a SAN cert installed, so a mistake all around. Compounding the issue, that utility offers to change your registry settings to harden it. Well, one of those changes broke all kinds of functionality apparently. Fortunately, the utility makes a registry backup so you can restore. After that, all was well.

I have a shell script on my Ubuntu 10.04 Server that runs every night and uses rsync to backup files to an external share mounted to the /media/backups folder.

The problem is, sometimes the drive isn't mounted, or the destination server is offline. When this happens, my server will happily save to a folder called /media/backups on the local filesystem, quickly filling up all available disk space.

How do you prevent rsync from writing to a folder unless that folder is a mountpoint? I just can't seem to find an answer to this on my own.

Background

My company is a small to mid-sized business and averages 200-350 GBs of backups per night, coming from 12 servers. Our backups are running on Backup Exec 12.5. We want to be really cheap on backup hardware. We originally went for the best deal on two 8-disk SAN enclosures we could find, and we got what we paid for. Within 2 years, both have died. The disks are fine, though. I just need to reconnect the drives and we'll be back in business.

Situation

Having gone through it a couple times now, I'd much rather have a single drive or enclosure die at a time than an entire SAN. So I'm considering putting those drives into their own individual usb 3 enclosures, connecting them all to a usb 3 hub, and connecting that to our backup server.

Question

I just want to get the job done at the best price. Would this be a support nightmare, or not work at all? Is there a better cheapo solution than this?

The title says most of it.

I have a Spiceworks mailbox that connects to our Exchange Server 2003 box via IMAP for receiving help desk issues. But for complicated reasons, I want it to receive those emails in text-only format.

So, I discovered that you can just go to:

• Exchange System Manager
• Administrative Groups
• First Administrative Group
• First Storage Group
• Mailbox Store
• Mailboxes
• Right-click the mailbox, Configure Exchange Features
• Edit the properties for IMAP
• Set that mailbox to only receive message bodies as plain text.

I click OK, then Next, it reports success, and I assume I'm done. But then when I go right back to where I was, I see that "Use protocol defaults" is still checked. Anyone have a clue why this would be?

Some other details: I'm logged in as Administrator when I do this. I can't change this setting for the entire IMAP virtual server because some regular users use it. I only have one IP address to play with, which means I can't create another IMAP virtual server. Any suggestions or ideas are greatly appreciated!

EDIT: this question was resolved by joeqwerty in the comments. If possible, I'd like the mods to mark this question as answered.

Summary: I want to be able to monitor the computers on my network, but don't need it to be automated. We're too small to purchase anything like MOM, but too big to do anything manually (~100 machines in two locations). I just keep running into issues, and was wondering if there's a master list of Group Policy settings I can distribute to my environment to get Remote Powershell working.

Environment: Our AD network is pretty mixed. The end users have XP SP3, Win 7, and Win 7 x64. The servers include Win2k3 SP2, Win2k8, Win2k8 x64, Win2k8 R2, and Win2k8 R2 x64.

Details: I'm trying to get it to work with Remote Powershell, but I run into errors like the following:

Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM 
client cannot process the request. Default authentication may be used with an IP 
address under the following conditions: the transport is HTTPS or the 
destination is in the TrustedHosts list, and explicit credentials are provided. 
Use winrm.cmd to configure TrustedHosts. Note that computers in the TrustedHosts 
list might not be authenticated. For more information on how to set TrustedHosts 
run the following command: winrm help config. For more information, see the 
about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

        + CategoryInfo          : OpenError: (:) [], PSRemotingTransportException
        + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PSSessionStateBroken

Then I go to the computer (Win2k3 SP2 server) and run winrm quickconfig per the recommendations via google, and it says:

Make these changes [y/n]? y

WinRM has been updated to receive requests.

WinRM service started.
WSManFault
Message = The client cannot connect to the destination specified in the 
request. Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting 
requests. Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service 
running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is 
the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and 
configure the WinRM service: "winrm quickconfig".

Error number:  -2144108526 0x80338012
The client cannot connect to the destination specified in the request. 
Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting 
requests. Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service 
running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is 
the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and 
configure the WinRM service: "winrm quickconfig".

That's right. It tells me to remedy my winrm quickconfig failure by running winrm quickconfig. I don't want to band-aid this project one google search at a time. I'm sure there is a step-by-step tutorial out there on how to set up a network for powershell remote administration. Does anyone know of one? Books are acceptable.

Thanks in advance! I didn't think my question would get this long.

EDIT: So far, this is the best one, but it's not comprehensive: http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/powershell/powershell_remote.htm

Technical Info: Exchange Server 2003 in a mixed AD 2003/2008 environment on a Windows Server 2003 Standard 32-bit computer.

Background: We recently changed backup solutions. Of course, just before we did someone deleted all of his sent items and didn't report it to us for a couple of weeks. Now, the best solution we have for recovering those emails is a backup of the priv1.edb and priv1.stm files created a while back during a defrag of the Exchange server database.

What I tried: I installed Exchange on a secondary server, hoping that I could pop in those files and Exmerge the relevant pst file out of there. However, I didn't want to risk any conflicts with the live Exchange server, so I disconnected it from the network. But then I discovered it won't let me go into ESM without being on the network, so this wouldn't work.

Questions:

• How does one export a mailbox out of the Exchange database (EDB) file, without attaching it to a server?
• Am I going to have to attach the database file to the live Exchange server during off-hours, exmerge the pst files, and then swap the live database back?
• Or, can I protect the live database by setting the main Information Store to offline while I work on the second instance of Exchange Server with the old database file?

Any advice is much appreciated!

Setup
1.5TB x 8 on a SANS Digital enclosure configured into two sets of 4 drives and connected to a Windows Server 2003 computer over eSATA. They are all identical Seagate Barracuda ST31500341AS drives.

Issue
I assumed the guy before me set the two sets of 4 drives up as RAID 0 or 5, but he really just set them up as two concatenated volumes. I laughed at the misuse of a perfectly good RAID controller and then proceeded to turn one of them into a RAID 0 array (I do not care if my backups are lost to corruption for one day).

When this was done, I was excited to benchmark my RAID 0 volume vs. the concatenated volume and show it off to my boss, but was disappointed to find out that they are the exact same speed.

So then I switched to a simple JBOD setup and benchmarked an individual disk and got about 70% of the performance and haven't changed anything since then. The r/w speed increases at a diminishing rate when I benchmark multiple drives simultaneously. Does anyone here have any experience solving a problem like this and have any suggestions?

Here's a typical benchmark result for 4 drives in a RAID 0 or concatenated set:

Test File Size: 500 MB
Testing New File Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 30.75 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.0%
Testing Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 73.73 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.4%
Testing Read Speed....
Data Transfer: 75.29 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.4%

Here's a typical single drive benchmark result:

Test File Size: 500 MB
Testing New File Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 23.98 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.6%
Testing Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 54.16 MB/s, CPU Load: 3.3%
Testing Read Speed....
Data Transfer: 50.09 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.4%

Here's the limit I seem to reach as I benchmark more and more individual drives at the same time (I got up to 4 drives at once):

Test File Size: 500 MB
Testing New File Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 73 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.6%
Testing Write Speed....
Data Transfer: 131 MB/s, CPU Load: 3.3%
Testing Read Speed....
Data Transfer: 104 MB/s, CPU Load: 1.4%

Update:
I realized the enclosure brand is SANS Digital, if that matters. The software and internal hardware are Silicon Image. Due to time constraints, I'm leaning towards a 6 disk JBOD setup with a single RAID 1 for truly important data. BackupExec handles multiple backup locations quite well anyway. The tests so far with 3 separate disks are encouraging--over the network, the backup speeds total about 40 MB/s.

Final Update:
I decided that RAID-10 wasn't worth my trouble and followed the plan from the last update. The total speed doesn't seem to be much faster, if at all. So looks like that's the maximum.

Our email server is Exchange 2003 in an AD network. Our spam filter is Trend Micro's ScanMail.

We are giving our sales reps a company email address and then forwarding all of it to their personal email address. To do this, we've been adding their external email address as a contact in AD, adding them as an AD user with an Exchange account, then all email sent to that user forwards to the contact.

This has been working fine, but they are signing up for spam using their work emails. And now, AOL keeps blocking us because we are forwarding some of that spam to them. Shouldn't AOL's mail server detect that we are not the original sender? Are there any suggestions as to how we could prevent this? I do believe that ScanMail is blocking some of it. It's just not doing a perfect job and it never will.

Update: I think my problem has been asked here. I missed that when I did my first search.