MS Exchange Blog

T minus one day...

"Microsoft's Open License customers will receive Exchange 2003 on Friday"

File-level AV Scanning & Exchange

As you should know, you need an Exchange-aware antivirus scanner installed on your Exchange 2000 server for the best mailbox protection.

If you wish to run file-level antivirus scanning on your Exchange 2000 server, there are some specific folder exclusions that you should definitely make. They are:

M:\
\exchsrvr\*data
\exchsrvr\mailroot
\exchsrvr\{servername}.log
\winnt\system32\inetsrv

Note that the *data folder means any folder under the parent \exchsrvr folder that ends with 'DATA'. This therefore includes MDBDATA, MTADATA, SRSDATA, etc. You should exclude all of these.

There's a Microsoft KB article here that details why the M: drive should not be scanned.

A good overall Microsoft KB article on this subject is here.

Neil Hobson

Upgrading Standard to Enterprise

Yet another popular question on the newsgroups is how easy is it to upgrade from the standard edition of Exchange to the enterprise edition? This is normally required after reaching the 16GB database limit on the standard edition, something you want to avoid if you can!

Assuming that you wish to keep the same hardware, then it is actually very easy. The four steps to the process are as follows.

1. Take a backup of your existing installation. Not mandatory, but recommended!

2. Simply re-install the enterprise edition over the top of your existing installation.

3. Re-apply the relevant service pack.

4. Test, and when you're happy, take another backup.

If you want the official blessing of a Microsoft KB article on this, click here.

If you're moving to new hardware, then you can achieve the move with practically no downtime following the Ed Crowley method here.

Finally, if you want to be convinced you're now running the enterprise edition, see another article of mine here.

Neil Hobson

Standard or Enterprise?

A question that seems to pop up fairly frequently on the newsgroups is how to determine the version of Exchange that is running, as in whether it is Standard or Enterprise Edition.

If you are running Exchange 2000, there is a very quick way. Simply open Exchange System Manager, and drill down to your actual server object. Right-click the server, choose Properties, and on the General tab, see if you have a tick box titled 'This is a front-end server'. This option is only available in the Enterprise Edition of Exchange 2000.

Since Exchange 2003 Standard Edition can now be a front-end server, that's not a reliable method if you are running Exchange 2003. Also, the above method won't apply to Exchange 5.5. There's another fooproof method that works for all versions of Exchange.

When the Information Store service starts up, one of two possible event IDs will be logged.

1216 is logged if the server is running the Standard Edition.
1217 is logged if the server is running the Enterprise Edition.

Neil Hobson

Has Outlook Today eaten your email?

A colleague of mine has just accidentally dragged a few messages into his Outlook Today folder. Of course, he could no longer see these messages, and wondered what had happened to them.

To retrieve them is actually easier than you might think. All you have to do is temporarily remove the web page associated with the Outlook Today folder:

1. Right-click Outlook Today, and choose Properties.
2. Click the Home Page tab.
3. Remove the Show home page by default for this folder tick box.
4. Click OK. The Outlook Today folder is now just a normal folder.
5. Go into the Outlook Today folder, and there are your messages. Just copy them back into the relevant folder.

I've seen this issue come up a few times now, and so thought it worthy of a short article!

Neil Hobson

Help!...

Ok, so what do you do if disaster has struck, and your information store has corrupted or hardware failure has killed your 5.5 server? Well, you can perhaps go down the pub, or more likely do a restore. This document should help with recovering your Exchange server using an Arcserve online backup to a recovery server.

Chris Meirick

Disaster Recovery...

I've been doing some badly needed 5.5 disaster recovery testing over the past couple of days. It's gone surprisingly well so far... successful online restores using Arcserve 2000 and Backup Exec v8.6 have been accomplished. I've taken some pretty comprehensive notes, which I'll post here over the next couple of days, just as soon as they've been typed-up, and I'm happy that I could hand them over to my mother to follow.

I'll be doing some offline restores tomorrow, and also hope to play around with Ontrack's great PowerControls application, which can extract data from an unmounted .edb.

Chris Meirick

Bringing up the rear?...

Blackberry don't as yet support Exchange 2003, only 5.5 and 2000 are catered for at the moment. Their tech support have suggested that their website be visited regularly for "updates on new software releases and service packs."

Chris Meirick

Using Outlook 2003 with 5.5?.. be careful...

Interesting...

"Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.5 using the Outlook Web Access (OWA) service is vulnerable to a denial of service attack. If a authenticated remote attacker accesses the mailbox through Outlook 2003 and then accesses this mailbox through OWA, the attacker can cause the Internet Information Server (IIS) Web services to crash."

I guess they'll be fixing this 'beta bug' :-) ...

Chris Meirick

Oh, and Sophos?...

"Sophos Adds Exchange 2003 Support to Anti-virus Offering"

Chris Meirick