Silicon Shecky

With all the hacks going on out on the net today, patching your machines is more critical than ever.

Microsoft is releasing 16 Patches, 9 of which Microsoft deems critical. Patches include Windows, Office, and .Net, and all attempt to address RCE attacks.

Oracle has also released a major patch for Java in the past few days which addresses a number of security vulnerabilities. Adobe has patches out recently for Flash, Apple is playing whack-a-mole with malware, and basically there is a lot of patching to do.

Don’t forget though, with all these patches, to test them before deploying them. It doesn’t happen very often, but some patches can break your software.

In the process of doing any sort of troubleshooting, I look in the event logs. Most techs do for that matter. Most entries in it have a nice clickable hyperlink to take you to information about that sort of event on Microsoft’s website.

So you have an issue, and there is an error showing up that might be related to it in the event logs. That’s what those logs are supposed to be there for. Microsoft though has screwed the pooch with its own help system off those logs. I have found the 99% of the time, the click here for more information link brings you to a page that says, “No More Information is Available.” Really Microsoft, why even put in a link for more info when you don’t want to give any more out.

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.