Exchange Server and the software business

In an Exchange Team blog, I saw a really interesting tidbit of information. If Exchange Server was a standalone business, it would be the 9th largest software company in the world!

The other interesting tidbit was that, according to a Ferris research, the Lotus Notes market share within enterprise businesses has dropped to 10% while Exchange is at 65%.

AOL is not accepting e-mail...

"AOL is not accepting e-mail from my server" "Road Runner is not accepting mail from my server".... etc Sound familiar? This is a pretty common question in the newsgroups. I have been battling this issue myself with one of my own customers.

Some ISPs (Time Warner's companies are notorious for this) check to see if your mail server has a PTR record. Does your server have an PTR record for it's public IP address? You can easily check here:
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx

Plug in your IP address in here to see a fairly comprehensive test. Ideally, your PTR record name (eg mail.somorita.com) should match the HELO or EHLO banner that your mail server sends out. Some mail servers will even reject your message if the EHLO banner does not match your PTR record. Fortunately, most don't.

Now comes the hard part: how do you assign a PTR record for your public facing IP address? You usually don't. The owner of the IP address must do that. That is almost always your ISP. Contact your ISP, tell them that you need a PTR record for your public IP and tell them what you want it to be, such as mail.somorita.com.

Enphase Inverter demo and management software demo

One of the solar photovoltaic inverters I'm considering has some pretty neat software that lets you monitor the system as well as individual panels. Take a look at the Enphase software demo.

Sending e-mail as an SMS or text message

Really useful answer by Michael W. on the Microsoft TechNet forums. If you want to send a text message from an e-mail client, most carriers allow you to do this. You send an e-mail message to number@emaildomain. For example, if you want to send a message to a T-Mobile user whose phone number is (808) 555-1234, then you would address the message to 8085551234@tmomail.net Keep in mind that the recipient may have to pay a "per text message" charge. Below are the US carriers. For more, see this link.

UNITED STATES
n@teleflip.com Teleflip
n@message.alltel.com Alltel
n@paging.acswireless.com Ameritech
n@txt.att.net ATT Wireless
n@bellsouth.cl Bellsouth
n@myboostmobile.com Boost
n@mobile.celloneusa.com CellularOne
n@mms.uscc.net CellularOne MMS
1n@mobile.mycingular.com Cingular
n@sms.edgewireless.com Edge Wireless
n@messaging.sprintpcs.com Sprint PCS
n@tmomail.net T-Mobile
n@mymetropcs.com Metro PCS
n@messaging.nextel.com Nextel
n@mobile.celloneusa.com O2 / Orange
n@qwestmp.com Qwest
n@pcs.rogers.com Rogers Wireless
n@msg.telus.com Telus Mobility
n@email.uscc.net US Cellular
n@vtext.com Verizon
n@vmobl.com Virgin Mobile

Lucid8 and Guerilla Marketing

Luicd8 has an employee (Troy Werelius, I'm at least assuming he is a real person) that has taken guerilla marketing a bit too far. In the age of Internet marketing, I have seen a lot of different techniques used to get the word about a product out. Some are tasteful and helpful while others are just plain spam.

Troy Werelius has been going through the Microsoft Technet Forums digging up ancient posts (sometimes 2 or 3 years old) and has been posting how the Lucid8 solution could have solved the problem.

Now, I don't have a problem with vendors letting their technical folks prowl the newsgroups and contributing (and timely) relevant assistance. I frequently recommend 3rd party tools. But, trolling for old posts that are only slightly relevant and then posting your product's names and links is over on the "spam" side of marketing.

Clearly, I think Lucid8 is loosing some good will on the part of the newsgroups regulars based on some of the responses I have seen so far. Am I wrong to object to this? Or, to blog about it?

Unable to Remove Exchange Mailbox Database or Exchange Server

"I can't remove an Exchange mailbox database" or "I can't remove an Exchange server".
I have seen this question a few times in the online forums recently and this is something that I frequently see myself as I move mailboxes around an Exchange 2003 organization. I usually use the Exchange System Manager to move the mailboxes around. However, one we

Microsoft has a good TechNet article on the process of removing an Exchange Server (or the last old Exchange Server): How to Remove the Last Legacy Exchange Server from an Organization

Another good KB article is You receive a "c1034a7f" error message when you delete a mailbox store: "One or more users currently use this mailbox store"

What I usually do is to add the mailbox database as a column in Active Directory Users and Computers, the go through each of the OUs that contain users and sort by that column. That is the quick and dirty way to do locate the mailbox.You could also perform a Find in ADUC and search for the old mailbox database name, but you do need the DN of the database to do that. Amit Tank recommends this custom query for ADUC:
(&(mailnickname=*)(msExchHomeServerName=*ServerName*))

Worst case, of course, you can navigate to the Mailbox Database using ADSIEdit and delete it. The following is an example of the path, but you would need to substitute your own organization, admin group, server name, etc...
Configuration -> CN=Services -> CN=Microsoft Exchange -> CN= -> CN=Administrative Groups -> CN= -> CN= -> CN=InformationStore,CN -> CN=

Key error messages:
The component 'Microsoft Exchange Messaging and Collaboration Services cannot be assigned the action "Remove" because: -One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server. These users must be moved to a mailbox store on a different server or be mail disabled before uninstalling this server.

Or
You cannot remove the mailbox database because there are still mailboxes on that store.

My home project - Using less electricity

I'm now on a kick to use less electricity. Well, at least, to "buy" less electricity. On average, my house uses about 45KWH per day (around 1400KWH per month). Current electricity cost is around US$0.20 per KWH but this time last year I was paying closer to US$0.33 cents per KWH.

A few years ago, I put in a solar hot water system on my roof. At the time, that saved me about $50.00 per month, but is probably saving me more now.

Here is some guesses as to the major power consumers in my house:

• 2 Dell T605 Servers - 6KWH per day
• 4 Desktop computers - 5KWH per day
• Pool pump (8 hrs/day) - 14KWH per day
• Refrigerator - 5KWH per day
• Air Conditioning (22 SEER rated at 7 hours day) - 3KWH

The electric bill itself does not bother me as much as the dependency on oil. Not that I'm an environmentalist or anything (I don't even recycle cans!), but from a political perspective I think the dependency on oil is a really bad thing.

I am planning 2 separate projects:

• Replace the pool pump with an Intelli-Flow pump. These are supposed to use 75% less electricity. They run continuously, but at a signficantly lower horse-power/amperage.
• Install a photo-voltaic system. I have proposals to install systems that produce between 6 and 32KWH per day. I'm probably going to go with a system that produces around 15KW per day, but can be expanded the second year with an additional 20KW of capacity. So the second year capacity would be around 35KWH per day. The initial system's cost is $28,000 but there are almost $19,000 in tax incentives to do this. At the current cost of electricity, the payback on this system is around 7 years.

If any of you did the math and are asking, wait a minute, if you are producing 35KWH of electricity per day, you are only producing that much during the sunny hours of the day (peak production for these systems in Hawaii is 9AM - 3PM though they will produce some outside of those periods. Your house is using electricity 24 hours per day.

Quite right. The final system that I'm looking at will produce around 8.3KWH (per hour). However, I'm not using THAT much an hour. In that case, my power meter runs backward and I feed electricity back out "on the the grid". The electric company can then use that electricity and (by law) has to give me credit for it. Then, at night, when I'm not producing electricity I can use back up the credits.

My ultimate goal is to produce about as much per day as my house uses. I can do that if I can improve the pool pump's efficiency. The initial investment is pretty high, but the system lifetime is 25+ years so the payback is tremendous.

Connections Online goes live!

Do you like conferences, but can't get the funding to travel? The Connections folks have a solution for you in the form of the Connections Online conference. You can pick and choose the sessions you want to attend (they are US$39.95 per session or you can buy a package) and once you purchase the session you can watch it as many times as you want during a specific period of time.

A few examples of the many sessions that are available includes:

• Active Directory Security Best Practices by Sean Deuby
• ESX and Hyper-V Comparison by Alan Sugano
• Eradicating PSTs by Martin Tuip
• Administrators' Idol: The Coolest Session Ever by Dan Holme
• Exchange and Certificates by Ilse Van Criekinge
• Group Policy: The New Hope -- Vista and the GP Preferences by Jeremy Moskowitz
• Get ready for Exchange 2010 : Why this release is the most important yet! by David Elfassy
• Exchange Management Shell – Beyond the One Liner by Glen Scales
• A Close Look Inside the SharePoint Engine by Randy Williams
• VSS Backup and Exchange by Michael B. Smith
• SYSVOL Replication Can Wreak Havoc in Your Network by Rhonda Layfield
• What’s New in Active Directory: Windows Server 2008 R2 by Brian Desmond
• Pragmatic ASP.NET (Tips, Tricks) And Tools by Steven Smith
• Clustering in SQL Server by Ronald Yenko
• All That You Can Learn About LINQ in One Hour by Dino Esposito

Public folders on a CCR cluster

Microsoft has long stated that locating a public folder database on a CCR cluster in an organization where there is more than public folder database is no supported. Bharat Suneja summarizes this nicely in Cluster Continuous Replication and Public Folders. As with many things that Microsoft says are unsupported but that actually works, I took this to be more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.

In one of my Exchange environments, we have a lot of regional offices with between 1,000 and 3,000 users. In the 1,000 user location, we did not want to invest additional hardware in a dedicated public folder server so we threw the public folder database on the CCR cluster. During testing that we move the clustered mailbox server (CMS) from node to the other, the public folder database moved just fine.

You guessed it, the active node failed a few weeks ago and the public folder database did not remount. We could not get it to mount at all. Period. End of story. Kaput. Dead database. I had a PSS engineer sitting right next to me and he could not rescue it either. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 is apparently hard coded not to allow the database to be recovered, even if you accept a lossy failover.

So, the moral of the story. If you have more than one public folder database in your organization, do NOT put it on a CCR cluster.

Symantec Endpoint Security Fan Club - Not!!!!

Over the past 3 months at work, we have came across a number of performance issues and other weird problems related to Symantec Endpoint Security. We finally made the decision to remove it entirely and go with McAfee. Yes, it was THAT bad.

I had a new issue today with Symantec Endpoint Security running on an IIS Server. Every time I made a change such as enabling ASP.NET or deleting the Default Web Site, when I ran IISRESET, I would look back in IIS Manager and the change would have reverted back to the original setting. I deleted the Default Web Site five times and it kept coming back. (Insanity can clearly be demonstrated by the person who does the same futile thing over and over again but expects a different result.)

Once I stopped all of the Endpoint service, I was able to make the necessary changes to IIS. Unfortunately, that is 2 hours of troubleshooting time that I will NEVER get back.

Ilse van Criekinge rocks!

As many people are aware, I am working on the Mastering Exchange Server 2010 book for Sybex. Ilse Van Criekinge jumped in and helped me out with the Exchange Management Shell chapter by providing an informal technical review as well as some new content with respect to the remote shell and the new PowerShell 2.0 GUI feature. Thanks Ilse! You are much appreciated! And, if you don't have Ilse's Exchange Management Shell book, well... what are you waiting for???!!!!

OWA logon using DoD SmartCard / CAC card

For those of you that work with the US Dept. of Defense CAC cards and OWA, here is an interesting article. OWA CAC Enabled Login

Windows 7, iTunes, and the iPhone

If you are an iPhone user, be careful about syncing your iPhone from a Windows 7 computer. One of my friends installed Windows 7 RC (release candidate) on his computer (from scratch) and then started using iTunes and syncing his iPhone. His Bluetooth headset stopped working. When he tried to enable bluetooth, the icon would just spin, but it would never enable. He tried resetting the device, turning airplane mode on/off multiple times, and more.

He finally took it in to the Apple Store and they said that Windows 7 was not compatibile with the iPhone should not be used. They had to completely erase the iPhone and reload the firmware. But, once they did, Bluetooth started working. As soon as he took it home and sync'ed it again, Bluetooth stopped working again.

Finally, he had to wipe the device out completely re-install the firmware again. Then, he sync'ed it from a Windows XP computer and Bluetooth has worked ever since.

I'm assuming this is a problem with iTunes that will be fixed as more people report this.

Pat Richard's new blog

My buddy, Pat Richard, has got a new blog. I promised him a link, but I am starting with a "plug". Pat is doing a great job of generating new content, including this article I really like on removing the Internet Newsgroups public folder

Microsoft Virtualization Benefits report

Microsoft has stood up a really useful site - http://www.hyper-green.com - that can help you estimate your electrical and energy cost savings based on the number of servers that you virtualize. It has a nice interface and actually spits out some useful numbers. It does not really take in to consideration the cost of the virtualization frame (servers, networking, storage), but does provide a userful starting point and some hard numbers to help justify virtualization. Thanks to Doug Fidler for sharing this with me!

Obama and letters from voters

The other day on the news, President Obama was talking about all the letters he was getting that was telling him how much health care costs were cutting in to their paychecks. I wonder if I send him a letter and tell him how much taxes are cutting in to my paycheck, will he do something about that, too.

ASP.NET application "wakeup" program

SharePoint, Exchange Outlook Web Access, and other Web applications based on ASP.NET are sometimes painfully slow and first use each day. This is because after so many hours of not being used, Internet Information Server (IIS) flushes the application from its cache. The delay you experience is IIS rebuilding the application in cache.

The Codeplex project SPWakeUp can be used with any ASP.NET application. Simply configure it with the URL of the application and a schedule it to run every few hours. This will "touch" the site and either load it in to cache or tell IIS to keep it in cache.

This can also be used with my company's Directory Update and Directory Manager applications.

Thank you for your service...

The other day at lunch, I was sitting the food court in a local mall with a few of my military friends (Air Force and Navy.) They were in uniform. A middle aged lady walked up to the table and in all sincerity told them each "Thank you for your service."

For a few moments after she left, even my friend who is never at a loss for words was a bit speechless. I don't think they would have been any happier than if she had even given them each a $20 bill. It was a very nice gesture on her part and was very well received. I would hope that more people would do this.

So, to the hundreds of thousands of men and women in U.S.A. voluntary military serivce, I also say "Thank you for your service."