Silicon Shecky

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.