technical solutions and commentary

When migrating from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003, the ADC automatically creates a Recipient Policy marked with the “Highest Priority” in Exchange 2003. This Recipient Policy reflects the policy in the Exchange 5.5 organization and it is therefore critical to the migration process. It cannot be given a lower priority until the last Exchange 5.5 Server is removed from the organization.

One of the advantages of migrating to Exchange 2000 or 2003 is the ability to create multiple Recipient Policies in the organization and assign them based upon ‘filtered criteria”. This is also something that can bite you during the migration process. If you are planning to create multiple Recipient Policies in the Exchange 5.5 environment, be aware that you should not modify the Highest Priority auto-generated policy. Because this policy is matched first to all users in the environment, it will assign the default SMTP alias to all users in the organization.

This means that if you have corpcomany.com as the standard alias and you have a subsidiary of statecompany.com, you may end up with the subsidiary have the primary SMTP alias changed to corpcompany.com instead of using statecompany.com. While users may still be able to receive mail using statecompany.com any replies would show up as corpcompany.com. I have seen other unexpected behavior from adding multiple recipient policies during the co-existence phase as well.

I would recommend not creating additional recipient policies until the last Exchange 5.5 server is removed from the organization. Unless you are very comfortable with how recipient policies work and update.

If you must create Recipient Policies during the co-existence phase, you can prevent Recipient Policy updates from being applied to users by going to the user objects, or by using AD Modify.NET to do a bulk edit of the user objects. (You can get AD Modify.NET from the ITedge.net downloads page.)

After installing QuickBooks on a Windows Server 2003 machine, the console is non-responsive. It may take up to 15 minutes for a user click to get a response, such as clicking on the ‘Start’ button. The World Wide Web Publishing service and dependant services will not start. Other network services, such as Active Directory, DNS, WINS, File and Print Services function normally for network users.

From the server console start task manager and launch programs from the ‘File / New Task (Run)…’ menu. This is a much quicker way to launch programs when the machine is in this non-responsive state vs. trying to use the Start Menu.

The Event Viewer will log the following issues:

Event ID 9098
Source MSExchangeSA
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to read its configuration from the DS, error ‘0×80040154′.

Event ID 9102
Source MSExchangeSA
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to read the state of cluster resources, error ‘0×80040154′.

Event ID 9099
Source MSExchangeSA
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to read the state of the services, error ‘0×80040154′.

Event ID 1036
Source W3SVC
A failure occurred while initializing the configuration manager for the World Wide Web Publishing Service. The data field contains the error number.

Event ID 1005
Source W3SVC
The World Wide Web Publishing Service is exiting due to an error. The data field contains the error number. 0000: 80040154

You may also see this event logged, although it may not be directly related to the issue:

Event ID 10010
Source DCOM
The server {GUID} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

What this is caused by…
When QuickBooks is installed onto a Windows 2003 Server, including SBS 2003, it modifies the registry permissions on the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT Registry hive. This is not an issue on Windows 2000 Servers.

Unfortunately QuickBooks requires the multi-user version to be installed on network server or a workstation that can run the service for all users. Do not install QuickBooks on a Windows 2003 Server unless you are prepared to follow the steps required to fix what the installation breaks.

To resolve this issue permissions on the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT need to be reset to the Windows Server 2003 defaults. See Microsoft KB 823159. Call Microsoft Support if you want assistance resetting the permission on the registry.

** You may have to tell the tier-1 support person what the problem is and then ask to get the right person on the phone. Three of the tier-1 support personal had no idea how to resolve this issue and we spent hours on the phone with tier-1 support before they would escalate the issue. Once it went to escalation the issue was fixed within an hour.

Some other things we found that looked like it could have been a resolution to the issues in Event Viewer, none of these worked in our scenario. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301919 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234429 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175804 http://blog.manueladam.com/Manuel/archive/2005/07/26/857.aspx http://lordmichaels.blogspot.com/2005/08/500-internal-server-error.html

Citrix has released a utility to check the health of your Citrix Presentation Server farm. It’s called ‘Project MedEvac’.You can get information on it from CTX107935  (Citrix login required to access this article). You must have a MyCitrix account or be a member of the Citrix Developers Network.

Changing the Citrix farm membership on an existing server is a simple straight forward process. Executing chfarm from command prompt will start a GUI and guid you through the process. When chfarm is run on a server to place it in a new farm, the server configuration is lost and will need to be recreated.

During the process, you will need to choose the new farm and zone names. In Presentation Server 3.0 and above you are also prompted to choose a license server. The following settings are NOT migrated to the new farm. These things must be recreated after the server is moved.

• Farm Properties are lost if a new farm is created with CHFARM. If an existing farm is joined, the settings are inherited from the new farm.
• Citrix Policies (user/machine) are lost if a new farm is created with CHFARM.
• Installation Manager Packages are lost if a new farm is created with CHFARM.
• Custom Load Evaluators are lost if a new farm is created with CHFARM.
• A new Farm Metric Server must be chosen if a new farm is created with CHFARM.
• Published Applications are lost and need to be reconfigured for the server.

Here are some additional Citrix Support Articles on using CHFARM:

If you don’t want to load OpenOffice.org and just need a small Word Processor, take a look at AbiWord. This can come in handy if you install it on a server where you don’t need MS Office but may need to open and edit files from the server console occassionally. It is a good alternative to using WordPad. It uses the functionality provided by the system such as image loading or printing.

You can download it here.

I took some time to upgrade my blog to WordPress 2.0. While you may not notice much change on the web site, because I am using the same theme, the back-end administration and features are great! They made many needed improvements and tons of great plug-ins are available. If you are using WordPress and have not upgraded to version 2.x I highly recommend it.

You can signup for Windows OneCare Beta for free here: http://www.windowsonecare.com/

I have been running Windows OneCare for several months and thinks it’s a good product. Check out the site and see what the features are and give it a try.

If you have installed Windows Server 2003 SP1 or the MS05-019 security update, in some instances you may experience issues with some client / server connections. If you are experiencing:

• Problems connecting to terminal servers
• Problems connecting to file shares
• Domain Controllers not replicating over the WAN properly
• Exchange Servers can not connect to Domain Controllers

Then see KB Article 898060 for hotfixes from Microsoft to resolve this.

According to Microsoft this typically happens when routers and data-link level protocols are using different Maximum Transmission Units (MTUs) across the network.