The crucible – My first training week as a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft Charlotte.

Anyway I wrote this partly for me to remember. More than anything really. The mind, has a way of filing things off in those weak brain cells that slip and falls destroy it seems. So this is sort of a log. Week 1 at Microsoft. In my face-to-face interview with Microsoft, I had a great… Continue reading The crucible – My first training week as a Senior Support Escalation Engineer at Microsoft Charlotte.

When an Exchange Server doesn’t Exchange…

“Well the high sheriff, told his deputy, won’t you go out and bring my Lazarus?” Why am I quoting the Po Lazarus tune, the opening song of “O Brother Where Art Thou?” when I’m supposed to be talking about the Exchange Server that doesn’t?  It’s the Chewbacca defense!  This Exchange Server is so hosed I… Continue reading When an Exchange Server doesn’t Exchange…

BPAs, not just for Exchange anymore…

So for those who don’t know, I used to be mainly an Exchange dork…ESE flowed in the veins don’t cha know? Anyway, one of the tools that rocked (and still does) is the ExBPA and the family of Exchange Analyzers.  But did you know in Windows Server you get analyzers as well?  And some are… Continue reading BPAs, not just for Exchange anymore…

How to determine who is connecting to your server in cached mode.

Applies to:  Exchange 2000/2003   This may seem like a basic thing to some people, but for those who don’t know, here goes.  This can be easily done by running Exmon, available here. So download Exmon and fire it up on your Exchange Server. Go to the By Clientmon tab, and in there you’ll see… Continue reading How to determine who is connecting to your server in cached mode.

Spoof your old dead Exchange Server

Ok, so if you have say, Citrix, or a standard image with Office pre-installed, then someone had to pick an Exchange server to point to for the Outlook profile creation wizard.So sometimes, in large organizations, teams don’t necessarily speak to one another before they make small decisions like which server to point to.  The person… Continue reading Spoof your old dead Exchange Server

Version Store 624 events

Applies to Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007. So in Version Store 623 errors, Version Store gets ‘clogged’, if you will, and will fail to process transactions. 624 errors on the other hand, are caused by a lack of available virtual memory on the server.  Sometimes this has no impact and the server corrects itself,… Continue reading Version Store 624 events

Avoiding Version Store problems in the enterprise environment

Applies to Exchange 2003    So one of the things that can go wrong with Exchange is that it can run out of something called Version Store.  Version store is an in-memory list of changes made to the database.  Nagesh Mahadev has an awesome post about Version Store on our msexchangeteam.com blog, posted here.  To… Continue reading Avoiding Version Store problems in the enterprise environment

PTE depletion, handle leaks and You

Applies to:  Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server, Windows 2003 32bit Server, Exchange 2000/2003 PTEs  Ok, so one of the most overlooked resources we run into with performance and availability problems is the availability (or lack thereof) of Free Page Table Entries.  What is a PTE?  It’s basically an I/O partition table, if you will.  Wikipedia has an… Continue reading PTE depletion, handle leaks and You

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