Archive for the ‘Exchange’ Category

Redirect Website Root to /Exchange & Correct Protocols

Friday, May 6th, 2011

Just been working on a way around one of life’s annoyances. To get to an OWA 2003 site on a Windows SBS 2003 box, I have to remember to put in https:// and remember to put /exchange at the end. It annoys me having to remember, I often forget the protocol and it wastes my time.

Today I had a chance to find a workaround for this. Turns out to be really simple.

I am using Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium, which includes ISA 2004.

Log on to your server and open up the ISA Management Console. Select the Firewall node on the left, and look down the list for ‘SBS OWA Web Publishing Rule’.

Open up the properties and select the Bridging tab. On this tab ensure that only the ‘Redirect requests to SSL port’ is selected, along with you relevant SSL port.

Next hop back to the Paths tab. In the paths tab there wiull be three entries, one for Exchange, one for ExchWeb and one for Public. These are important and you must not edit these. Instead add a new path, with the internal name as /Exchange and an external name of /. Your window should look something like below.

Apply your changes, and test your work from a remote machine.

These instructions should also work if you have a separate ISA and Exchange server and are not running SBS.

Exchange 2007 SP3: Exchange Server Setup encountered and Error.

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Not the most useful error message that you will ever see. Combine this with a lack of information in the Exchange Setup Log and in the Event Viewer you have a small mystery.

However, the answer is probably really simple: Check you have met the pre-requisites for the setup to run.

  • Member of Enterprise Administrators
  • Member of Schema Admins
  • Member of Exchange Organisation Administrators

And the final check, which allowed setup to run for me. If you have UAC enabled on your server, then right click the setup application, and select Run As Administrator.

Feeling a bit stupid for forgettting about this feature. 2 weeks working on Windows Server 2003 makes you forget that these new-fangled security features exist!

2 people found this post useful.

Exchange 2010: No In-Place Upgrade

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Really disappointed to have just found out that an in-place upgrade is not available when migrating from Exchange 2007 to 2010.

Totally understand why this is the case though. Database schema changes and the lack of storage groups in 2010 being the root cause. Not great news for the smaller places which probably haven’t got the finances to purchase a new server for a bare metal installation, or enough hardware to perform some sort of swing installation.

At least on a plus point, SharePoint 2010 does support an in-place upgrade from SharePoint Server 2007 SP2. At least one of the upgrades will be simple this year. Looking forward to trying out the new features. Shortly going to be getting our development system up and running ready to formulate our deployment plans.

Anyway, enough of my drivel. Back to coming up with a plan for our Exchange 2010 upgrade.

Could not access OWA using HTTPS – Error 404

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Symptoms here are:

  • Unable to access OWA
  • Outlook 2007 reports that it is unable to change any Out Of Office settings; server unavailable.

The enviroment: Microsoft Exchange 2007 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

One other symptom, which I don’t know if this resolved or something else did, is that the Free/Busy information was not accurate when scheduling a meeting.

The fix:

  1. Ensure that you have a current server certificate, even self signed, in the Personal store for the local computer on the server.
  2. Open up IIS Manager
  3. Right click the Default Website (or the site that hosts OWA), and select Edit Bindings
  4. Make sure there is an entry there for https. If not create one.
  5. Edit the entry and make sure that the correct IP address and port settings are present.
  6. Ensure that the current certificate that you verified existed in step 1, is selected for the SSL Certficate.
  7. Click OK and clos all windows. No need to restart IIS, and your site and services should now be back up and running.

Outlook Send/Receive 0x8004010f

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Been having this problem on all machines which use Cached Exchange Mode at work. Was really beginning to get annoying as any of the suggestions that I found on the MSExchange Team blog did not seem to work. For reference, the site is was on is: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/04/19/437902.aspx

After a while of head scratching and null answers, started looking a bit out of the box. Had a look at ISA server, just by chance, and noticed an error occurring every time that a Send/Receive was initiated from a client.

As my ISA server is only meant to log internet requests, I thought this was a bit weird. A look a little closer found that I had a typo in an address configured in my proxy pac file. All local traffic had been going to my ISA server and being logged since I made the change (about a week ago).

So, sorted out my proxy pac file, made sure that everything was pointing to the right place, and everything started ticking along nicely.

Downloads started working and everyone could then access the address list offline again.

Convert Legacy Mailbox to User Mailbox

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Just had to convert a load of Legacy Mailboxes created accidentally by a colleague who forgot to use the new Exchange 2007 console to create their mailboxes. Had about 350 new users so dong it manually wasn’t really an option!

Using the power of pipes in Exchange 2007 Shell you can run the following command to upgrade all legacy mailboxes to user mailboxes. Do make sure that you want to do this before hitting enter. You can filter the affected users even more if you wish.

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails LegacyMailbox | Set-Mailbox -ApplyMandatoryProperties