The IT Crownd

Grrr....pulling my hair out on this one. We have SCOM 2007 R2 (which I love) and we are running the excellent management pack for Exchange 2010. If you read an earlier post I finally figured out that the Agent Proxy needs ticking to make discovery work so we are humming along now. Except for one thing. My Public Folder server. We have one mailbox server dedicated to public folders.  The problem here is that this server is never healthy.  KHI: Failed to execute Troubleshoot-DatabaseSpace.ps1 fails. Looking into this script I see that this script uses the Get-MailBoxDatase this will not work on a public folder.  Further investigation leads me to believe that all the scripts within the Exchange 2010 Management Pack are not Public Folder compatible.  Now whether this is because a discovery which isnt running in my environment I don't know...*grrrr*

Bleeding edge?  So you will proboably know what PVSCSI is all about We had two days of worry - our Exchange 2010 Mailbo server was showing events of having a corrupt database.  The event description pointed at the storage.  ESE 482: Thus ensued a witch hunt for the actual culprit.  Storage logs reported all fine...the issue came and went.  Unfortunately when it came the databases failed over to the other node of the DAG. We found a page on VMWare's site detailing that a high IO server could have issues when using PVSCSI and that updates to the driver are required.  The driver updates pre-requiste was of course a patch to ESX 4 too.  Not something we can do on a whim, change management anyone? See here: http://longwhiteclouds.com/2012/03/14/win-2k8-with-pvscsi-critical-issue/#more-801 and here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2009144 So we had to remove the PVSCSI devices.  This is actually muc

Bit of a fool on this one! Spent a couple of days wondering why our new Exchange 2010 boxes weren't appearing in SCOM only to remember (with a hint from a Google search) that Agent Proxy needs enabling.  Flush Health Service State and Cache. Bingo. d'Oh! Note to self...read the manual!!

From the title you can guess that we have Exchange 2010 (SP1 CU6 - with Hotfix for EVault) and we are using NetScaler VPX to load balance the services.  I used the excellent document from Citrix to configure the NetScalers (we have two in active/active - sort of using VMACs to split the traffic RPC to one, HTTP(S) and SMTP to the other). However I found a document from Microsoft which points out that there is "significant performance penalty" if we configure incorrect persistence for EAS.  The Microsoft document is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625248.aspx This put us in a pickle and no mistake.  This is because in a NetScaler persistence is per vServer.  We have one vServer for HTTPS as we have one IP address for all HTTP traffic.  This vServer would then deal with all HTTPS traffic including OWA,ECP,EWS,RPC over HTTPS and EAS.  OWA requires cookie based persistence, this is also the method the Citrix document recommends.  From the Micros

Recently came up against a brick wall when rolling out 120 or so laptops to our users.  This monster issue came in the guise of the failing 3G cards within our Dell laptops. We saw that after a build of Windows 7 the cards functioned fine and were able to connect to the local provider after configuring. When we came to do our final checks we noticed that some of the laptops had failed 3G connections.  This failure was not laptop model based (we had two models both of which randomly showed the 3G failure) Since the only thing between build and the check was some Windows patches we surmised that one or more patches were the issue.  There were 85 patches.  This took a while.  It turns out that even after removing all the patches the 3G card refused to function correctly. More investigation turned up that the WWAN service was disabled.  Enabling and starting this service sorted out the problem.  Hoorah. Not quite. After a while some laptops showed that the service was disabled ag