Windows Server Administration

OK Here we go back in the swing of things and the first server I am going to “Virtualize” is an Exchange 2007 Server that holds the Edge Server Role. After Reading this article it all seemed fairly straight forward. How wrong I was !!! Here is what I did that led me to this unwanted ERROR “The Exchange Server is in an inconsistant state” when I was trying to install the Edge Transport Role on the new Hyper-V Virtual Server.

The first thing that needed to be done was an export of the current server configuration using, as Microsoft calls it, “cloned configuration tasks”. There is a folder located in the install directory of Exchange, generally C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ called “Scripts”. Inside there are 2 Powershell Scripts that you will need.

They are ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 and ImportEdgeConfig.ps1.

To capture the configuration we need to run the ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 script in the Exchange Management Shell like so:

./ExportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:”C:\CloneConfigData.xml”

NOTE: Make Sure you run the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right click > Run As Administrator)
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I have been working through an issue we have at the moment with the Exchange 2007 Offline Address Book (OAB) and it’s generation, replication and distribution. In my Exchange 2007 setup the server that houses the Mailstore Role is the server that generates the OAB and then should replicate to the Server that hosts the Client Access Server Role.

The first issue I was having was that the Generating Server was not generating the OAB correctly. Probably not a good thing if people need to the Global Address List. So I hunted through the Event Viewer and found errors pertaining to the System Attendant “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of the Universal Security Group”. Now what I did here was to RESTART the System Attendant Service and that fixed those errors. From my research I gathered that the System Attendant caches some information regarding Globsal Catalogue Server and other information. We had been moving the FSMO and GC Roles around so that would have been the issue there.
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I had this situation the other day where a client needed to have their email forwarded from their Exchagne 2007 Mailbox to their newly created GMAIL Account. They will be using the GMAIL account as their primary email account for easier collaboration because they work in 2 different enterprises. In the Exchange 2007 environment POP3 or IMAP are not enabled therefore he couldn’t set up GMAIL to fetch his mail that way.

So to make this work I created a New Mail Contact on the Exchange 2007 Mailstore:

Open up the Exchange Management Console > Click on the Recipient Configuration Node. Then from the Actions Pane on the Right click on “New Mail Contact”. Select New Contact and click next, Choose the Organizational Unit for the contact and fill out the appropriate fields. Then in the External Email Address box click Edit and enter in the SMTP Address of the external email address, click Next and then Finish.

Now you have a new mail contact set up we can then forward the mail from the Exchange 2007 Mailbox to that mail contact.

From the Exchange Management Console go to the Recipient Configuration > Malbox Node and find the mail box for which you would like the mail forwarded from, right click and select properties. Under the Mail Flow Settings Tab select Delivery Options and then Properties.

Place a tick in the “Forward To” Box and then click Browse. Find the Mail Contact that you just created and click OK. There is anopther option that you can enable and that is to Deliver message to both forwarding address and mailbox. Put a tick in there if you would like to enable that.

A while ago I wrote about how to easily export Exchange 2007 MailBoxes to PST Files for archiving and backup purposes. Now that is OK if you want to run the process manually but what about scheduling the export for out of hours?

If you have followed the previous post and have successfully completed and export to PST File you will notice that you have to confirm that you want to proceed with the operation. Very annoying if you want to schedule this script and in fact the task will fail. This is how I managed to get around the need to confirm before proceeding prompt in the Exchange 2007 Management Shell.

If you remember from the previous post this command will export Mailboxes from a specific Database to individual PST Files.

get-mailbox -database “SERVER_NAME\DATABSE_NAME” | export-mailbox -PSTFolderPath C:\PSTFiles

With this command you will get a prompt asking you to Press A for All Y for Yes N for No etc etc. Not good if you want to schedule this.

Here is the KEY to avoid the prompts. Add -Confirm:$false to the end of the Export-Mailbox String. Therefore the new String would be:

get-mailbox -database “SERVER_NAME\DATABSE_NAME” | export-mailbox -PSTFolderPath C:\PSTFiles -Confirm:$false


All Done, Now you can Schedule away…….

For the past couple of days I have been struggling with our Exchange 2007 implementation. But I am glad to say that all things are looking good and we can now send and receive mail! Whoo Hoo…..

What I have been playing with is the Edge Server and the new improved Anti Spam features that it brings to the table. Which for us is a reason in itself to implement an Exchange 2007 Mail system. But what has been frustrating is the fact that it did not seem to be working! But Yesterday we had a massive breakthrough.

The setup that I had was the Edge Server is sitting behind our ISA 2006 firewall which is forwarding all SMTP Traffic to the Edge Server. But it wouldn’t work unless we had “Request Appear to come from the ISA Server computer” selected and the ISA Server Computer’s Ip Address in the “Allowed IP List” on the Edge Server. Now that was no good because then all the mail appeared to be coing from the ISA box and not the origional client.

So….What I did was I changed the gateway of the Edge Server to the ISA 2006 box and then changed the “Request Appear to come from the ISA Server computer” to “Request Appear to come from the origional client” in the SMTP Publishing Rule and BINGO the Edge Server is doing it’s Anti Spamming Job!

The downside to that was that we now could not send any mail. Because the ISA box is in our DMZ we could get out. So after subscribing the Edge Server to Active Directory and the Organization it automatically creates Send and Receive Connectors. So what I did was change the “Source Server” from the Edge Server (which had a gateway of the ISA box) to our CAS (Client Access Server) which was also running the Hub Transprt Role. Our CAS Server had a different gateway and could send mail out. We now have a working model. And what is more important the new SPAM agent on the Edge Server is working a treat!!!!

Daniel
Creating a Working Exchange 2007 Infrastructure.

As the migration form Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 continues, one of the areas that is a MUST is the ability to backup mailboxes. In this Exchange 2007 How To, I will show you how you can export malboxes from your Exchange 2007 Database to individual PST Files.

In order to export or import mailboxes to PST files you will need to make sure that the following this are in order.

• Export/Import to PST must be run from a 32 bit client machine with Exchange Management Tools installed (Version Exchange 2007 SP1 or later). The 32bit requirement comes from a dependency with the Outlook client.
• Either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 must be installed on the client machine.
• The user running the task must be an Exchange Organization Admin or an Exchange Server Admin on the server where the mailbox to export/import lives.

Open up the Exchange Management Shell, then what we are going to do is pipe the results from the GET-MAILBOX command to EXPORT-MAILBOX, Like so.

get-mailbox -database “SERVER_NAME\DATABSE_NAME” | export-mailbox -PSTFolderPath C:\PSTFiles

What I think is great about this is that you can select different mail databases. For example we have 2 seperate databases, one for staff and one for students. Therefore we can split this process up and run it on different days.

Next up is to create a scheduled task to run the Powershell Command. Subscribe to my RSS Feed to keep up to date with more Windows Server Tips, Tricks and Tutorials.

I have been working on a migration from an Exchange 2003 environment to Exchange 2007 over the past week and have just about completed it. A thing that I wanted to point out that I thought was pretty cool was how easy it was to grant people permissions to open up other users mailboxes from the new Exchange 2007 Command Shell (PowerShell)

Add-ADPermission “DataBase Name” -User “Username” -ExtendedRights “Receive As”

There is a great need for this in my environment as I am often asked to track BAD Emails that students may or may not have sent. Executing the above command and replacing “Username” with my username, “Database Name” with the name of the database, in my case I have 2 seperate mail store databases for Staff and Students, and bingo I now have the ability to open all mailboxes in the database that I specified.