The Public folder issue with the Exchange 2010 migration has been solved. An old lesson was reconfirmed. Then the chewing out of myself commenced.

Many years ago, when I was first learning to fix and build PC’s, I would go to the local monthly computer show. Each month would mean some new part for upgrading or replacing. It was fun to learn about these things, see what I could do with them, even cause the parts to eventually die out because of my own stupidity. It was a glorious time.

Eventually though I ran into a problem that took forever to solve. I had replaced something in my computer, and straightened up the cables connecting the PC to everything. I fired up the machine, and… no sound. Checked the settings in windows, checked the driver, pulled the card out, tried a different card, all still with no sound. 6 months I kept dealing with this problem, checked everything I could, tried new cards and still no sound. Well I checked almost everything I could. In month 6 of this issue, I went to do another cable cleanup, and that is when I found that I, for 6 months, had the microphone plugged into the speaker jack and the speakers plugged into the microphone jack. This was before they color coded everything, and for 6 months I swore that they were plugged in right. I assumed they were is more like it.

For many years I have told this tale to friends, and colleagues to exercise the point of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method. Always check and double check the simplest things before moving on to the more complex reasons. Sometimes though, even I need a swift kick in the rear to remember this.

I had been struggling this week with the public folder migration from Exchange 2007 to 2010. The Mailbox migration had worked fine. The public folders though had been beating me up. The hierarchy was not propagating, let alone the folders communicating. I did some research, and found that the replication was done over email, basically emailing the folders between servers. So I started checking SMTP settings, telnetting between machines, even remembered that there was a problem with mailboxes on the 2007 server sending e-mail to the mailboxes on the 2010 server, but not vice versa.

All the symptoms were there, right in my face as to the main portion of the answer. I still didn’t see the simple thing though, instead looking up every way I could think of describing the issue in Google, with no fix. Then, on day 4 of this madness, while starting to look at yet another site’s solution, the answer hit me in the face. I logged into the Domain Controller, opened up DNS, and yep, there it was. Actually, there it wasn’t. When I set up DNS for the new server, I had forgotten to put in an MX record for the new server. All they years of dealing with DNS and MX records, I had forgotten the simplest thing, yet for 3 day had assumed I had put it in. I was elated and angry with myself all at the same time, especially when I saw the hierarchy start to show up on the Exchange 2010 server (the rest of the solution was cleaning up the old security certs on the exchange 2007 server, and getting a new self signed cert on it).

So once again, I get reminded of the 6 months of no sound from the speakers, and why one really does need to double check the simplest things even more thoroughly than the complicated thing.

The Exchange 2007 server needed to be rebuilt. The BES was all migrated and ready to go. The new server was prepped. No real test environment available, but enough scenarios gone through. The time to Migrate to Exchange 2010.

Over this past weekend, I got the Exchange migration project nearly completed. Friday, I spent the afternoon making sure I had prepped the new server properly. That all the roles needed were installed, and that the system was patched. It came to be 4:30 pm and I started the procedures as I had planned. Changed the IP on the old Exchange Server to an open Internal. Changed the IP on the new Exchange server, to the old one’s IP so that I didn’t need to make any firewall changes. Changed their entries in DNS, and made sure it took. Then Migrated my Mailbox, and tested, and Outlook wouldn’t connect. Checked my settings on the Hub Transport, and found I didn’t have a few boxes checked. Checked the appropriate boxes, and Outlook worked. Tested Internal and External E-mail. External worked just fine. Internal, well, I wasn’t getting any e-mail from people that had not been migrated to the new server. Not a big deal, as I migrated the helpdesk tech’s e-mail and tested locally. That worked. So Exchange 2010 could e-mail to people on the 2007 server, but 2007 could not e-mail to the 2010 server. Still not a big deal. So I migrated all the boxes over the weekend.

While that was happening, I made my adjustments to OWA, Active Sync and made sure the Blackberry’s would still get e-mail, along with the Android phones. By Sunday afternoon, all the mailboxes had been moved over, and I had started on working on getting the Public Folders back up and running on the 2007 server so I could replicate them over and be finished with it all. The bad thing when a migration is going smooth, is that one can become complacent. Sure enough, the Public Folder Hierarchy would not populate on the 2010 server. Nothing that was on the 2007 server, none of the folders were showing. Houston we have a minor problem. I went to bed, waiting to see if it was just taking a long time to propagate.

Walk into the office on Monday, sure enough everything is working just fine, except the Public Folders had not been replicated yet. I know it is because Exchange 2007 can’t e-mail to Exchange 2010. So I continue looking for the answer to this issue, but outside of that, the migration was pretty painless.

Going from Blackberry Enterprise 4.1 to Blackberry Enterprise Express 5.0.2 looks like a daunting task, but really it is not that tough.

So there I was, ready to find the stash of nukes I hid somewhere. In anticipation of the migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 coming up real soon, I had to upgrade our BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) to the most recent version. the prior guy who had gone through 2 weeks of Blackberry training kept putting it off, coming up with excuses, and now is no longer with the company. I had done what anyone should do. I read up on the product and learned how to do the upgrade. Then the worst thing happened. Upon running Windows Update and Rebooting, the Blackberry Server came up but only enough to be pingable. I couldn’t remote into it, which meant so much for doing everything after hours.

First thing in the morning I went to our server room at the office where the BES is located, forced a hard reboot and the server came up normally. then came the task at hand. Few small things about going from BES 4.1 to BES Express 5.0.2. First you have to completely uninstall 4.1. Second, 5.0.2 is extremely slick. Once installed, and I got the users added into it, the majority of phones were found and automatically connected, as if they had always been on the 5.0.2 version of the BES. There were a couple of problem phones, but for the most part, all the planning on having to reactivate 50 Blackberrys went to the trash.

Sometimes, when things get done right, good surprises happen. Just never let it stop you from planning for the worst case scenario. Next step will be the final Exchange Migration.

Exchange doesn’t like drive error, or bad blocks. Never has, never will, and while there are things that can temporarily correct the problem, new hardware is the ultimate solution.

I’ve been slowly prepping to do a migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 at the company I work for. I’ve done my reading, come up with all sorts of bad scenarios, and basically anything else I could think of to prepare for it. Mind you, I’m not the only high end internal IT guy (Engineer, support, sales, etc…), but I’m also the only outbound tech. I had things planned out to finish the actual prep the day before a long weekend a few weeks ago, just in case I ran into any problems.

Smart thing I did that, because I ran into a major problem. I had to go to a client site, due to a printer issues. the client is a major one for the company and the directive came at 10pm in the evening from by boss to be out there the next day. This of course caused me to cancel the planned migration.

The day of the cancellation was going to be installing Exchange 2010 on the newly purchased server, and installing the latest version of Blackberry Enterprise server so that we could keep using our Blackberries. Needless to say, a few days after the cancelled migration date, our current Exchange 2007 server starts running really slow. Disk errors, bad blocks, a chkdsk cleared the errors, and I was put on the hot seat.

I explained why the migration had not happened, how I was ordered to be down at a client for a printer problem. How the amount of e-mail data will take 2-3 days to migrate, and that I wanted to do it over a long weekend. I was asked for a hard date for the migration, something soon, since slow or non-working e-mail near the end of the month was not acceptable. So I gave a date of this upcoming weekend, and went to work on getting the domain all prepped.

So here I am trying to run the Schema and AD prep on a domain where the Exchange server is in a separate site (Not domain, just physical site) from the Schema Master. Not only that but the Schema Master is a 2003 server. Yes, following Microsoft’s information of just running the Schema Prep through a 2008 server that is in the site where the schema master is located, has not worked so far.

I know I’ll get it, I dealt with this went tossing SP2 on the Exchange 2007 server, I’m just frustrated that Microsoft doesn’t even know how its own stuff works.

So I have a couple things that tie together into the title today. The fun thing is that the two examples are separate ends of the spectrum, but both show stupidity and are a great source of frustration.

Example 1 is all about how people think lowly of IT. Recently I have had to deal with a situation where a security certificate for e-mail was nearing expiration. We tell the people about it, ask for them to renew or purchase a new one so that RPC over HTTPS continues working, and so that they don’t get certificate warnings every time they locally open outlook. Do they listen? Nope. Who gets blamed? We do. Then the kicker is getting someone to agree to pay for a brand new certificate takes forever. I just love how we get listened to sometimes.

Example 2 is even more interesting. SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 both came out late last year. SBS 2008 you can get preloaded on a Dell server. EBS will not be available from Dell until the end of the month. Heck you can not even get a quote from Dell on an EBS server. The only way to get a Dell EBS server is to get a Dell Server with no OS and separately purchase EBS from another vendor and install it. As if this wasn’t annoying enough, when talking with my Dell rep, I get asked, “Whats wrong with going with standard server 2008?” Well considering that the client wants an all in one solution, but already has 75 users and is still growing, SBS is out, but EBS is in. Its what EBS is made for. So why all these months have passed and Dell does not offer it? HP does. Makes no sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and working in the IT field, there are just some days that I have to go … WTF!

So, in the midst of not writing too much this week, I’ve had a lot of headaches. Headaches that you can avoid.

Headache number one. Always do a daily check of backups. Make sure that everything including SQL databases are being backed up properly. If they aren’t, find a way to remedy that.

Headache number two, SQL 2005. Yes SQL works nicely, but when you have people who insist on using the Eval version past its 120 period, upgrading them to the full version is a pain. One that Microsoft can fix by not forcing an uninstall of the eval and install of the full version. Oh and double check all backups before you do the uninstall.

Headache number three, Windows updates and Symantec Endpoint. I have hit this one a few times this week, where Windows Update goes into a weird connection and install loop for a patch and can’t install it so keeps retrying to the point that Symantec Endpoint 11 things the server is under a DoS attack. Course this eventually led to other issues that required a reboot of the servers in question, so they worked properly again. Well two of them did, the third one led to…

Headache number 4, ease of finding information from Microsoft. Yes, Technet, and Google are nice items, but when one puts in a search about corrupted exchange log E00, you would think that you would get all the info or at least KB articles that offer solutions for it. This is not the case. It took about 100 different search strings along the exact same parameter, with a small change here, small change there to words or order, to finally find the missing step to bring back up a clients exchange information stores.

Yeah, its been a busy week, but at least there are lessons to be learned. The biggest one is that Microsoft is painful.

You know, I love my job. I love being able to work on things and learn new thoughts and ideas as I work. It is so fulfilling to see a project finished and working right. The only problem is they never are really finished.

So after the big file migration, and the corrections to the AD Users/OUs/Groups was down to a tweak here or there, I decided to see if I could figure out why some things with Exchange and DNS seemed to be so damn slow. They say that curiosity killed the cat and satisfaction brought him back, well we shall see how this ends.

Between finding that AD/DNS integration was set to a legacy standard, even though we use Server 2003, to find that we had only 1 Global Catalog, even though we have 5 DCs 4 of them at other sites, only one DC as a Global Catalog. Replication for AD was set to 4 hours, and all other sorts of small errors in the DNS server have been found. Its the sort of stuff that should have been thought through when the original migration from 2000 to 2003 happened.

Well, at least its keeping me busy, and who knows when any of this stuff will come in handy, but I know it will at some point.

So, while reading the other blogs and news sites I check daily, I came across this interesting article. It seems that Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 SP1 has caused yet more problems. This time with Exchange 2007 on SBS 2008.  With this latest issue that has now cropped up with .Net 3.5 Its time to remember a few things…

1) In Microsoft’s defense, they can’t test everything before releasing stuff. That is why hot fixes exist.

2) Never just accept patches. Always find a way of testing them yourself, even if it is on a personal machine, and research the patches also to see what problems other’s have had. The more reports you find, the more prepared you can be about any issues with it.

I know they are simple thoughts, but just watching how Microsoft has screwed up with this latest version of  .Net it just amazes me that people don’t think of these things. Course, I am one to speak.