Most common exchange 2003 support issues

rockstar81

What are the most common problems/issues network admins find with exchange 2003?

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sprkymrk

You might try checking here:
http://www.msexchange.org/

blargoe

more than could be listed in one post...

Danman32

I'd say faulty AD, which in turn is usually caused by faulty DNS.
Missing/misconfigured global catalog.
Corrupted stores or logs. Misconfigured real time antivirus scans can yank a log file and crash the store. Sometimes you can recover the yanked log from quarantine, reconfigure RTFS, and then remount the store.

Those are probably the most common I come up with when clients call.

Oh, and misunderstanding on how to configure server and DNS for internet mail. Sending IP address (usually the router's address) needs to have a PTR record associated with it, otherwise AOL and others will reject mail you send to them.

blargoe

Going over the storage limit. In the past year I have seen servers with mailboxes that grow too large, databases that grow beyond capacity and go kaput, and a server that ran out of disk space due to poor disk planning, all of these can cause data loss.

BubbaJ

I don't administer Exchange, but what I hear from the people that do is scalability is a real problem. It sounds like up to 20,000 users is fine, but it is a constant battle to keep it running with 10 times that many.

Danman32

blargoe wrote:

Going over the storage limit. In the past year I have seen servers with mailboxes that grow too large, databases that grow beyond capacity and go kaput, and a server that ran out of disk space due to poor disk planning, all of these can cause data loss.

Since MS released SP2 for Exchange, that kicked off another set of support concerns: SP2 expanded the store size limit for standard edition, but the registry maintains the old limit+2GB=18GB. So you have to do a registry hack to unlock the new limit.

blargoe

Eww... I wasn't aware of that! I'll make sure our main exchange admin knows this.

Good for me to know since the new job I start next week I'll be jumping into primary responsibility for Exchange!

Danman32

This link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912375/en-us will provide a link to the whitepaper on the new options available in E2K3SP2.

Trailerisf

blargoe wrote:

Going over the storage limit. In the past year I have seen servers with mailboxes that grow too large, databases that grow beyond capacity and go kaput, and a server that ran out of disk space due to poor disk planning, all of these can cause data loss.

There is a trick to increase the storage limit to 17GB (short term reconmended only)

Danman32

Trailerisf wrote:

blargoe wrote:

Going over the storage limit. In the past year I have seen servers with mailboxes that grow too large, databases that grow beyond capacity and go kaput, and a server that ran out of disk space due to poor disk planning, all of these can cause data loss.

There is a trick to increase the storage limit to 17GB (short term reconmended only)

'trick' no longer applies to E2K3SP2. Already automatically extends to 18GB and can be extended to 72GB by a registry change.