Happy Diwali

Back Again .. New passion

This marks a new chapter in life .. I was away from the blog for a loooong time. But a new hobby has given me a reason to be back on the blog. I tried orkut and facebook in the last 3 years. I am bored of all the social sites.

I joined my dream company 2 years back, But I am not a hands on techie anymore. Good news is that I am driving towards the right direction. Will get back to being a techie, Posts will follow soon.

Crictet has taken a backseat, photography is the new passion.

Event Source: MSExchangeIS Event ID: 9536

Too many things have happened in my life since I last wrote .. I got married .. :) .. I hope everyone will understand that I had much more to do than write .. Another thing that changed, Is the job. I have just started to get settled in my job and life .. Both of them were moving at the speed of light.

Something that did not change is the place where I stay. House number and street address have changed. But the city and state remain as it is.

Life after marriage is much more complicated than exchange. It can be an outage / P1 / Critsit ( meaning : ask someone at MS Support ) if your new boss ( I mean your wife ) is not supportive and understanding.

Getting back to the technical world. One of the errors that I found on the exchange box was :

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeIS
Event Category: General
Event ID: 9536
Date: 7/10/2009
Time: 3:55:58 PM
User: N/A
Computer: EXBOX01
Description:
An ambiguous Mailbox Guid ecebdef2-4230-4f223-c839-bedfee88849f was found on 0x2 mailboxes in the DS. The store cannot map this Mailbox Guid to a unique user.

In order to find the culprit, Download the tool : ADFind and run this command

adfind -gc -b "" -binenc -f " msExchMailboxGUID={{GUID:ecebdef2-4230-4f223-c839-bedfee88849f}}" -dn

You will know what to do now. Delete the mailbox, reconnect, purge etc. It can vary as per your environment.

Exmerge via Script

We can perform bulk exmerge from different mailbox stores on the same exchange server and also schedule it. This sounds cool .. isn't it .. This is true as well.

So how will we do this .. All we need is legacyDN for all users for whom we need to perform exmerge.

How to get it ? One way is to write a script and the other way is csvde
I will explain the second one and if you need the first way then mail me ..

csvde -s -d "ou=users,ou=china,dc=rishimakeiteasy,dc=com" -l displayname,legacyexchangeDN -f exmergedata.txt

The output file exmergedata.txt will have the contents that you need. Open the file is excel and get the desired result. The input file only needs the legacyexchangeDN value.

Step 1 : Create a input file e.g exmergeusers.txt and add all legacyexhangeDN values one per line.

Step 2 : Open exmerge.ini file from the exmerge folder and make the changes to the following sections -

MergeAction
Should be set to the default (which is MergeAction=0) this means that EXMERGE is looking to export only.
SourceServerName
This value needs to the set to the name of the Exchange server that we are going to extracting data from - for example SourceServerName=MyServer
DataDirectoryName
The is the directory where you wish for the PST files to be placed - be mindful that the location needs to have enough space to accomodate the exported files.
FileContainingListOfMailboxes
The FileContainingListOfMailboxes value should be teh patch where you save exmergeusers.txt

Step 3 : Create a batch file e.g exmergestart.bat. Contents of the file are :

C:
CD c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin\
EXMERGE -F EXMERGE.INI -B

Now you are ready to trigger the batch file also it can be added to a schedule task. Remember to do this is off production hours.

Blackberry users are not able to send emails or perform address lookup

I am back from a well deservered break and as I wrote in the last blog .. My travel to the woods was great .. the bad part was that I was not well during my stay at the woods .. Life is changing at a great speed .. Both professionally and personally.

I will write about my self after a month ... Lets get on with some t/s.

I encountered a problem that Blackberry users were not able to send emails but were able to recieve. Another thing missing was that the GAL lookup. This was strange and was happening with all users.

On checking the event logs and BB logs I found this :

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BlackBerry Messaging Agent DNT037 Agent 4
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20265
Date: 1/22/2009
Time: 5:31:50 PM
User: N/A
Computer: DNT037
Description:
{TPI00761} MAPIMailbox::~MAPIMailbox - DeleteAllDeviceSearches (0x00000000) failed

This points to connnectivity of BES server to the exchange. Thus, we need to restart BB services and the issue is resolved.

On digging deep I came to a conclusion that this happens after Exchange servers are patched and rebooted. So as a practice whenever exchange servers are rebooted that should be followed by a reboot of the BES server.

Event Source:MSExchangeMU Event ID:1043

If this is what you guys are looking for : Metabase Update failed to initialize enumerator of virtual server on cluster database. Error code is error 800706d9 (There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper

As usual I will write about my life and then the resolution to the problem. If you are not interested in me .. scroll down .. :) .. I don't mind.

As we are a step away from the new year .. Thanks to the economic slowdown .. there is less work .. After a long time .. I enjoy coming to office ... I could catch up with lot that has changed during the last few months when i was burried under loads of work / pressure / dead lines / ego's / mergers / fast changing bosses ...

Also, i m going to Nilgiris on 1st for 2 days .. this is a resort at the foothills of ooty and i will have lot to write about when i am back. I have a topic in my mind already .. This may well be my last trip as a bachelor. After that the count down starts and a new chapter begins ..

Here is the resolution :

Then you are at the right place. I faced a simliar issue and could not find much on google. Thus, giving me an oppurtunity to write another post.

This error should take you to cluster service and no where else .. There is no problem with the cluster database .. Still, you can check it :

C:\windows\cluster\clussvc /debug > c:\debug.log

Check the log file to find more ..

If you are not able to RDP to the server .. Then, use DRAC / ILO etc to get inside the box and delete the profile of the cluster admin account. You need to remove it from :

1. C:\Documents and Settings
2. Right-click My Computer, click Properties, and then click Settings on the Advanced tab under User Profile.

Once done .. Log off fromt the server. Then login with the cluster account. All you need to do now is to start the cluster service .. BINGO !!!

You have done it .. The issue is resolved .. If then you have to find a RCA .. Best of Luck .. If you find one .. lemme know ..

Resource Scheduling - The operation timed out

I have been a lot busy for last few months and I had good stuff to write about. But thanks to nisha ( the cyclone in chennai ) .. I got some time out .. I will cover an interesting topic today that is not easy to find on the internet. But before I begin .. as custom .. I will talk about myself and then the technical stuff ..

I completed one year in this city of humidity / cyclones / heavy rains ( Good for me at times ) .. It was a slow start but the last few months have moved at the speed of F1. There have been ups and downs .. But I am confident of a great future.

We shifted to a new building and it is a cool place .. I have a permanent place to sit ( Finally .. As I thought a manager should have one .. But my company did not feel that way ) .. Roll # 1 .. Just opposite to my Boss's cabin .. I have to walk half a mile to take a print out and 3 steps to get a thrashing from my boss .. Not a good place .. But my boss is happy as he has a printer in his cabin and all his team in front of his eyes ...

The city girls have been kind to me .. Sangeetha ( Where I had food ) and Nisha ( The cyclone ) .. Lets move on to the technical stuff ..

We recently moved out data center and it was sever by server ... So we were actually decommissioning - shipping - reinstalling with a new name .. In the process .. we came across a problem that the conference room ( Mailbox enabled AD accounts ) stopped showing the free / busy info and when we clicked " Resource Scheduling " it gave an error - Operation time out.

It happened as all the information for free / busy is stored in the system folder ( Schedule free + busy ) and old PF server was moved and renamed. This is what needs to be done to fix it :

1) Open PFADMIN and add the new server with PF as replicas under ( Schedule free + busy )

2) Correct the site folder server name .. This is how you do it.

• Open an Active Directory editor, such as ADSI Edit.
• Locate the public folder information store you want to designate as the Site Folder Server, by expanding the following: CN=, CN=, CN=InformationStore, CN=, CN=Servers, CN= ,CN=Administrative Groups, CN=, CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=Services, CN=Configuration,DC=,DC=com.
• In the right pane, right-click CN= and select Properties.
• In the Attributes field, scroll down and select the distinguishedName attribute.
• Click the Edit button, and then copy the entire attribute to the Clipboard.
• Expand the Configuration container, and then expand CN=Administrative Groups,CN=,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=,DC=com.
• Right-click the administrative group you want to modify and select Properties.
• In the Attributes field, scroll down and select the siteFolderServer attribute.
• Click the Edit button and paste the value for the distinguishedName attribute into the Value field.
• Double-check the contents of the Value field to ensure the paste was done correctly, and then click OK to save the change.Click OK to close the administrative group properties dialog box.
• Exit ADSI Edit and restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service on all Exchange Server computers in the site for the change to take effect or wait for replication.

Note : On the client side, click Start, click Run, type Outlook /cleanfreebusy, and then press ENTER. Alternatively, send a test meeting request to all users homed to this server and ask them to accept the request.