EMC Clariion unmanageable

Well I changed the IP on my Clariion CX3-20c on both SPA and SPB, now they only see themselfs, and no data. Basically the fix was to go into the setup http://IPADDRESS/Setup. then choose the Reset all domain information and restart the Management Server. (Destroy Security and Domain Information), reboot the managment agent, then repeat for Node B as well, then rebuild the domain, and whola, it works again. Don't forget to re-setup any alerts or anything else you have.

I want to know what users to harass because their mailbox is too large

Lets say 1GB+ is too large

Get-MailboxStatistics -Server csmailstore1 | Where {$_.TotalItemSize -gt 1GB} | Sort-Object -Property TotalItemSize -Descending | Format-Table DisplayName,TotalItemSize > c:\mailboxsizes.txt

Exchange Send-As problem

Doing an exchange migration between AD Forests, Logging in as my new account, I was able to give myself rights via Exchange and AD to my old mailbox in the old domain. Exchange permissions were a snap, the only exception is that they had to be done via powershell since the Exchange 2007 GUI doesn't allow you to 'pick' users from another forest. Granting the Send As AD Right is also done with powershell , such as

Add-ADPermission "brian smith" -user newADDom\bsmith -ExtendedRights Send-As

However, every 15 minutes or so I noticed that this right would vanish, i'd do a
Get-ADPermission "Brian Smith" ft -wrap > c:\Brian.txt
and notice there was no permissions to newADDOM\bsmith.

I found out one of the security restrictions is that Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins can't have "send-as" rights to another mailbox. Therefore I have to remove myself from those groups in order to work in a Send-As Scenario. Nice Job Microsoft, way to use a 'best practice' guide as an excuse not to fix a huge bug. There are work arounds, but they look to difficult to bother with for the short time before we migrate.

NOTE: you really gotta make sure its removed from all of the groups that are members of any of the other builtin groups.

DC's out of Time Sync

So apparently NET TIME is depricated, and replaced iwth w32tm /monitor and other w32tm (windows time) commands.

Doing my w32tm /monitor command showed me that my DC's were out of sync. Seeing this I wondered why. I noticed in the registry that many of my DC's were syncing with time.windows.com. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters

Since my PDC emulator has the appropriate settings to be an NTP server and is pointing to an external time source my company likes, it's ready to be sync'd with, so I wanted to point all my DC's to it, and not time.windows.com

I modified the "NtpServer" REG_SZ parameter to be the IP of my PDC Emulator, restarted the Windows Time Service, and blamo in less than 3600 seconds, it all works again

Exchange Not delivering emails(SCR Replication), Active Mailbox Delivery Queue Length growing, Information store wont start Exchange 2007

We use the new SCR replication to our Remote Backup location.  For some reason emails started to queue up.  I rebooted the Mailstore in hopes the hub would then be able to deliver the messages, this didn’t help, when Exchange mailstore came back up, the IS and SA wouldn’t start, here are some of the event log errors:

==========================================

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    MSExchange ADAccess
Event Category:    Topology
Event ID:    2142

Process MSEXCHANGEADTOPOLOGYSERVICE.EXE (PID=1528). Topology discovery failed, error 0x8007077f.

==========================================

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    MSExchangeIS
Event Category:    General
Event ID:    5000

Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service.   - Error 0xfaf.

==========================================

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    MSExchangeTransportLogSearch
Event Category:    General
Event ID:    7005

Microsoft Exchange couldn't read the configuration from the Active Directory directory service because of error: Failed to load config due to exception: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.NoSuitableServerFoundException: The Exchange Topology service on server localhost did not return a suitable domain controller………

==========================================

All of this told me that exchange was unable to locate a GC in it’s site.  That’s pretty odd, there is a DC/GC racked right above it on the same lan.  However, after quite a bit of trial and error I noticed that in AD Sites there was no “Subnet” for this range of IP addresses, someone had deleted it.  Once this was fixed and I forced a full AD Sync, everything came back online.

NOTE: another thing I did was to change the DNS settings for the Exchange Mailstore.  I read that sometimes you have problems locating a GC if you point to a DNS/DC server that is far away and not in your site.  I doubt this did much, but its working now so I thought i’d throw it in there.

I couldn't seem to find replmon on 2008 server

well turns out its been replaced by repadmin.

so commands like repadmin /replsummary , things like that should show you what you need.

When you install ESX

The only changes I recommend are these.

800 MB for Service Console (for HP ESX mgmnt, for Backups)
1600 MB for Page File (should always be 2x SC above)
1500mhz reserved for Service Console (for backups, misc)