Apparently you can’t backup exchange 2003 and the system state on the same backup set. This is a change to how e2k worked and seems a bit weird although there is a technet article explaining that the 820852 – Backup of the Exchange Server 2003 Information Store and the Windows Server 2003 System State Data Does Not Complete Successfully and Event ID 8019 Is Logged. I guess you could set two jobs to run with the second job appending to the end of the tape. My nly concern is that if its not done as part of the normal backup then its unlikely to get done at all – just how many people update their rdisks – and I mean the floppy version – of their NT4 servers.
Did you know that if you shift-delete an item in outlook, although it doesn’t appear in the deleted items folder, it is still recoverable using the recovery feature, normally only seen on the deleted items folder. The guy who wrote this facility has the relevant writeup on how to enable deleted item recovery on other folders.
Had a weird problem on a home users pc today where they couldn’t access their outlook web access. It just keeps asking for the username and password on this XP (home) machine. If we access the same url with the same username/password combo on it on any other machine then we get in ok. We can also get into other outlook web mailboxes on this affected pc. Unfortunately the mailbox we are trying to get into is the owner of the laptop! Update The problem was solved by changing the password for the user (and yes I was using the correct password as the same username/password combo worked from other machines)
Theres a 32MB Exchange 2000 Post-Service Pack 3 (SP3) Rollup Patch available since the 27th August. I guess I’ll be installing that on Monday – there is NO WAY i’ll be installing that remotely over a vpn connection!
Clara are now testing email address’s provided as the “from” field in emails sent via their servers. If they are unable to check this email address is valid by sending a bounce message then the outgoing email will be rejected as per their email to the announce list. They should really have announced they were going to do this *before* they implemented it, and I don’t really see how this is going to stop spam emails as most email address’s used ARE valid – they are just not valid for the spammer!
I think I have found out why our mail server is playing silly wotsits!
UpdateThis also explains why we’ve not had many virus alerts coming through – looking at the NAV logs, I don’t think it has quietened down at all.
Been having some weird problems with our webmail access to our mail server today. The MD of the company said it was giving him an error (which I eventually tracked down to the main page that comes up after you’ve logged in.) A couple of hours later, with no changes made, this page was coming up ok. When I then got home and tried to access the page with internet explorer (the best browser for Outlook Web Access) I get a http 500 error message, yet the pages are fine using Mozilla Firebird – ie6:0, Firebird:1 🙂
Will have to wait until tomorrow to see what the problem is as I’m not in the office!
Just tried to install the Exchange Administration tools on the XP laptop and it failed due to the message ‘The component “Microsoft Exchange System Management Tool” cannot be assigned the action “install” because the Windows 2000 Administration Tools must be present.’
This is because the install checks for the 2000 version of the adminpak which is incompatible with XP. (I had already downloaded the adminpa for Windows2003/XP. A patch is available from Microsoft that fixes exchange installation software to allow installation on xp.
I signed up for the Exchange2003 7 day trial of Outlook Web Access. This is touted as looking as close to outlook as possible. The screenshots show what this Outlook Web Access for 2003 looks like.
Had an interesting problem this morning when one particular email client was getting “blank” emails whenever he was sent an email in html format. However, on closer look pictures in the email were appearing for a fraction of a second and then disappearing again. Right clicking on the email and choosing view source showed the html source for the email. Saving this as a html file and opening it in internet explorer 6 (on the machine) showed a blank page. Looking at the same page in Firebird (which I had to download and run) showed the text and picture of the email. A quick look at the properties of Internet Explorer showed it was running without the servicepack1 to it. Updating it cured the problem – emails were now visible again. A very strange problem and one that had me stumped for a while. A search in google showed a few other people with the same problem but no solution – hopefully this post will help others in the future.