It was a long day in the office today with an upgrade of a windows 2000 server running exchange2000 to a windows2003 running exchange2003. We also upgraded a w2k server running sqlserver to w2k3 too. The sql server was the easiest upgrade with no hitches whatsoever – shame we couldn’t say the same thing about the exchange server.
It all went wrong when the dell firmware cd hung on upgrading the firmware and after it had kindly disabled the nic’s so I had no network access to the machine. In the end we had to power off the machine to get it back and working. We then upgraded the firmware by hand (as opposed to using the openmanage software which upgrades everything at the same time (or is meant to)). After that exchange2k3 went on the machine with no problems.
However, when we went to upgrade to w2k3 the cd wanted drivers for the scsi disks AND the network card so I had to waste 2 cd’s to download the drivers for each (I burnt one cd for the disks and then it asked for the network after the cd had been finalised).
After providing the new drivers the machine came up and there were a couple of registry entries that had been wiped out as part of the upgrade which were there earlier (to do with virtual memory handling)
Anyway, to cut a long story short we got the servers upgraded and turned on imf version2. This will be great to convince the boss that we really DO need to configure postini to drop email that is sent to nonexistant email address’s. At the moment we are getting about 1000 spam emails every 15 minutes due to a fundemental flaw in the way postini is setup. Email to valid users is scanned and blocked if it is spam (thats about 150 users) but email to nonexistant users is passed through (to catch any email address’s that we might have forgotten to add to postini). Naturally this clogs up the incoming pipe and then exchange sends out ndr’s (even though it’s not supposed to). I’m not too bothered about the bandwidth as they are on a fast line but I am concerned about how hard it is to track mail using the mail tracker during a time period. If you try to use the message tracking system to find any email that was sent within the last hour, it is not possible as exchange refuses to show you more than 1000 emails in the tracker – which narrows down the time frame to about 15 minutes! As it is all spam the imf is now picking up (and archiving) all this email so I hope we still have some disk space left on the machine on Monday morning. We should do as a quick calculation showed 750MB per month and we have about 30gb available at the moment.
Having said all that, this will be great proof to the boss to show how much email they are getting (as I don’t think they believe the quantity)
