Managing email addresses in Exchange 2010 and 2007

Shay Levi (MVP) has posted yet another great PowerShell tip,

this time he blogged about how to modify the EmailAddresses property ( which is actually a MultiValuedProperty ) with powershell 2.0 new capabilities, making adding an additional or removing an email address from a recipient a snap!

check it out

Managing email addresses in Exchange 2010

Grant Full Access to All Mailboxes in Exchange 2010 – even for new databases

Hi again,

Since Exchange 2010 was released I always run into this request from administrators and help desk personnel:

“I want full access to all mailboxes, and also to all future mailboxes too ! uh and new mailboxes in new mailbox databases too !”

🙂

The following commands will do the trick, copy the first row separately- Exchange 2010 only:

$user = Read-Host -Prompt:"Enter UserName to grant permissions";

$organization = Get-OrganizationConfig;
$databasesContainer = "CN=Databases,CN=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT),CN=Administrative Groups," + $organization.DistinguishedName;
Add-ADPermission -User:$user -AccessRights ExtendedRight -ExtendedRights Receive-As, Send-As, ms-Exch-Store-Admin -Identity:$databasesContainer;

And remember with Active Directory permissions an explicit allow overwrites an inherited deny. so this will work even if you do this to an admin user / group.

Hope this helps !

Adding Read-only permissions to Exchange 2007 Auditing Logs

Hi,

I was asked today to add a permission to the Exchange Auditing log which is included with Exchange 2007 SP2 installations to simplify auditing,
after activating Mailbox Access Auditing , I was requested to allow read only permissions to the IT Security group.

What seemed to be quite straight forward, was soon to be changed with SDDL ACL format….

Here’s the quick how-to:

– Note, this was done on a Windows 2008 server

  1. Identify the SID of the user/group you wish to allow access.
    Using powershell you can easily find it e.g:
    Get-User | Select SID
    Get-Group | Select SID
  2. Then following this KB – Which was the most simple and self-explained, add the appropriate permissions.
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028427In-Short – each event log is located in the registry at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesEventLog
    the Exchange Auditing log is also located there, and in that key you will find an existing CustomSD string value with the ACL’s in the SDDL format ( more info in the links I added below )
    I was required to add read-only permissions to the IT Audit group, which is a “regular” group, without special domain / enterprise rights,
    so in my case i used the following:
    (A;;0x1;;; [Your Group Name/user account SID])
    so appended that to the existing CustomSD value.
  3. Restart the server.
  4. Now the user/group can access the Exchange Auditing log from any computer 🙂

Links:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee331009%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx – White Paper: Configuration and Mailbox Access Auditing for Exchange 2007 Organizations
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028427 – Writing to the Windows Event Log from an ASP.NET or ASP application fails.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323076 – How to set event log security locally or by using Group Policy in Windows Server 2003 – Also useful if you’d like to set this via GPO
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/05/07/the-security-descriptor-definition-language-of-love-part-1.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/05/07/the-security-descriptor-definition-language-of-love-part-2.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2008/08/12/event-logging-policy-settings-in-windows-server-2008-and-vista.aspx

Happy Auditing !

Hub Transport Role Install Failed with error 2147504141

Wanted to share with an experience I’ve had with installing Exchange 2010 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 R2 in Hyper-V 2008 R2 environment.

When I i tried to install a fresh server for testing Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta, the setup failed when installing the Hub Transport Role:

Error:
The execution of: “$error.Clear(); install-ExsetdataAtom -AtomName SMTP -DomainController $RoleDomainController”, generated the following error: “An error occurred with error code ‘2147504141’ and message ‘The property cannot be found in the cache.’.”.

An error occurred with error code ‘2147504141’ and message ‘The property cannot be found in the cache.’.

This issue is not “new”, as IPV6 is tend to be disabled as default by many customers, and installations of Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 fails with the exact same error if IPV6 is Disabled.

My virtual machine was clean and did not had IPV6 disabled, so I’ve searched this up to the following thread in the Technet Social Forums : Hub Transport Role Install Fail error # 2147504141

A comment from Scott Landry gave a new solution for this, and seems it’s now also been related to Hyper-V, as the suggested KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980050 – Error message when the Exchange Server 2010 setup on a Hyper-V virtual machine fails:“2147504141”

Anyhow, disabling the ” Time synchronization ” from the Integration Services settings on the Virtual Machine solved this !

Just a heads up for all of you that might encounter this.

MSExchangeRepl 2147 / MSExchangeRepl 2104 / MSExchangeRepl 2127 occurring on Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR)

As i ran into this issue this week,I’ve stumbled upon this thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesoftwareupdate/thread/eca3bbf7-ee9f-41bd-89e8-47a81780292b

Seems the cause for these errors, are because SMBv2 introduces status caching into the LanManWorkstation service…read more at SMB2 Client Redirector Cache

So to fix it I’ve added these registry keys under :

HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanworkstationParameters
FileInfoCacheLifetime [DWORD] = 0
FileNotFoundCacheLifetime [DWORD] = 0
DirectoryCacheLifetime [DWORD] = 0

My errors on the server were:

Event ID : 2147
Raw Event ID : 2147
Source : MSExchangeRepl
Type : Error
Machine : SERVER
Message : There was a problem with ‘ActiveNode’, which is an alternate name for ‘ActiveNode’. The list of aliases is now ‘ActiveNode’, and the alias ‘was’ removed from the list. The specific problem is ‘CreateFile(\ActiveNodeStorageGroupGuid$LogFile.log) = 2′.

ID:       2127
Level:    Information
Provider: MSExchangeRepl
Machine:  SERVER
Message:  The system has detected a change in the available replication networks.  The system is now using network ‘ActiveNode’ instead of network ‘ActiveNode’ for log copying from node ActiveNode.

Thanks a lot for JR on sharing this, check out Tim McMichael with more info on this:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/timmcmic/archive/2010/07/11/msexchangerepl-2147-msexchangerepl-2104-msexchangerepl-2127-occurring-on-windows-2008-or-windows-2008-r2-with-exchange-2007-cluster-continuous-replication-ccr.aspx

Exchange 2007 SP3 is out !

At last !

Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 was released this week !

What’s New ?

  1. Top requested Support for Windows Server 2008 R2 server installations
  2. Windows 7 – for Exchange 2007 Management Tools
  3. Improved Password Reset Functionality – Enable the Exchange 2007 SP3 Password Reset Tool
  4. Updated Search Functionality – mailbox server side indexing
  5. Support for Right-to-Left Disclaimer Text
  6. And of course… Active Directory Schema Changes, although with only a few changes but still take that into account.

Don’t forget the installation path to success :

  • Prepare your environment – Forest changes..
  • Upgrade Client Access servers (Internet Facing first…)
  • Upgrade Unified Messaging servers
  • Upgrade Hub Transport servers
  • Upgrade Edge Transport servers
  • Upgrade Mailbox servers

Enjoy !

Reference:
Ask and you shall receive – Exchange 2007 SP3 w/support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Now Available
What’s New in Exchange Server 2007 SP3

Exchange 2007 SP3 Release Notes

Download Exchange 2007 SP3 here

Microsoft Knowledge Base monitoring

I’d like to share with all of you one of best effective sites I use to “track” hotfixes for Microsoft products..

http://kbupdate.info

The nice thing about this website is that it sorts, yeah ! sorts the products and list the updates by date also 🙂 simply amazing.

For example, the list of KB’s that were written for Exchange 2010 in the year 2010.

Enjoy !

Delete old removed or disconnected device drivers

So you’ve plugged a harddrive / disk-on-key or any other hot plugged device, and oops BSOD 🙁

or, you want to install a new driver for a device that you have removed, but windows magic plug-and-play installed the driver automatically…. but you don’t want that do you ?

Anyway there’s an old method that works great.

You open device management, and click , view “show hidden devices”… but you fail to see your disconnected devices…

FIX – Show all disconnected devices, open System Properties, click Environment Variables and click to add a New System Variable.

Configure a New System Variable

After this you will be able to launch Device Manager again and when you’ll click to Show Hidden Devices, you will see all those removed or disconnected device drivers !

Device Manger Before-After

That’s it ! Enjoy

How to Use Telnet to Send SMTP Email to Exchange 2007 and 2010

Thanks to Jeff – The EXPTA {blog}, you can have full how-to ” use telnet to send SMTP email” for some basic testing and such.

I’ve ran into A lot of issues when migrating to Exchange 2007 / Exchange 2010 , due to the strict RFC compliance that Microsoft has implemented with the new transport (SMTP) stack.

anyways, enjoy this fine how-to:

http://www.expta.com/2010/03/how-to-use-telnet-to-send-smtp-email-to.html