The ramblings of a computer geek
We use SMTP on our Exchange Servers to provide authenticated SMTP email service for those who are using email clients which require SMTP to send email. We had an issue that following a certificate expiry that any SMTP connections to the server (that were attempting to use STARTTLS) would fail. For example: The issue was … Read more
We had an issue where a recent Windows update broke the Exchange Server, luckily booting into safe mode and removing it resolved the issue, however although the databases mounted okay, there was one that did not. We attempted the typical ESEUTIL steps because it was reporting “dirty shutdown”, and got the database back to a … Read more
You want to search your Microsoft Exchange message tracking logs to track an email, you can do this using a Powershell command (run from the Microsoft Exchange Powershell console), the below command will query all your Microsoft Exchange servers to find the tracking logs and then obtain all emails sent by the user “sender@domain.com” between … Read more
Emails are made up of a header and body, the body may be HTML or plain text, and any attachments are encoded within the body of the email for it to be sent. We have applied limits to our email infrastructure to reduce load, bandwidth, and disk space but also to protect recipients of our … Read more
We have a number of 2 node DAGs which provide our Microsoft Exchange 2016 service. Being a 2 node DAG a file share witness server is in place. We had a datacentre event that took out one of the nodes and the witness server, rendering the one of the DAGs unhealthy and a second in … Read more
We run a number of Microsoft Exchange 2016 server (yes I know we need to upgrade), these consist of four, two node DAGs with a pair of shared witness servers. For the purposes of this explanation however, we have a two node Microsoft Exchange 2016 DAG, with a single DAG Witness Server (File Share). Situation … Read more
In certain situations the Exchange DAG witness can become a problem, this can occur during an upgrade or can happen if there is a network interruption. Although the DAG will continue to operate the witness is considered failed, which can cause odd behaviour in a failover scenario, as there is no quorum available for the … Read more
Microsoft Exchange provides the capability to allow publishing of user calendars to the Internet, this is different from calendar sharing (which is typically internal, i.e. within our organisation). These instructions explain how to enable publishing by policy and how to apply it your own user mailbox. Calendar Publishing Policy Configuration on Microsoft Exchange These steps … Read more
Within the Microsoft Exchange configuration you’ll see that there is an InternalURL and ExternalURL attribute for each of the key Microsoft Exchange Web Services, e.g. OWA, ECP, ActiveSync etc. Personally i’ve never really used these when they are different, but what it allows is for your internal and external URLs to access the services to … Read more
If you need to quickly check the health of a protocol, Microsoft Exchange 2013 onwards provides a URL that you can query to ascertain the health of the service. Obviously if you query this and get nothing (i.e. a timeout) you can assume something is wrong, or if you get anything other than a “200 … Read more