Simon Barratt

MS Exchange 2003 - Day 5

Today we dived into some of the basic maintenance type activities.  What you should be checking to make sure things are healthy.  These include the Windows event logs (check out http://eventid.net for explanation codes), the performance logs, any antivirus logs, the protocol log and the Exchange store statistics.  These statistics give you a nice summary of the mailboxes, size of them, number of messages, but unfortunatley no apparent way of exporting them on a schedule.

Other areas to monitor are the queues obviously.  Depending on how you have configured your email environment this fluctuate.  But, even in the class, there seemed to be an unusually high amount of queue types entries to keep any eye on.  The value of the queue summary screens will becomre more (or less) evident when viewde in a live environment.  Because of Exchange's major limitation (only providing a single object store) you do derive some benefits when it comes to overall summary information.  Whether that information is usefull remains to be seen.  Being able to simply present how many messages are in a mailbox doesn't seem to exciting!

As part of the Windows resource kit, you can install a tool call httpmonitor, which allows you to monitor how Outlook Web Access is running.  Why this is part of the OS and not Exchange, is another repeating theme.  Whilst there seems to be a very clear scope as to what Exchange can do, there seems to be quite a mish mash of management tools to keep it running.

Something new in Exchange 2003 SP1 is the way badmail gets handled.  In previous versions this junk just queued up in the badmail queue and required you op use Windows explorere to purge it.  As of SP1, the system simply disregards bad mail altogether.  This has never been a problem for us at FMC, due to the controls we have in place.  email addressed to non existant email addresses are simply refused (by virute of our Sendmail servers querying the Domin LDAP for valid addresses before accepting them) before they enter our email system.  As we re-engineer our environment, I will have to pay carefull attention to this area.

We moved onto some command line tools!!! (yes, who'd of thought!).  These two tools allow you to defrag/compact the mail stores and repair and database integrity issues.  The scary part about both of these tools, is that you have to unmount the mail stores first, kicking off all your users in the process.  I did a quick poll around the room, and I was assured that you never need to run these commands!  Exchange just keeps on running!  So what are they there for?  I hope the concensus proves to be true.  We currently provide 24x7 email availability and never have to plan for this type of downtime.

The commands are:
defragmentation tool: eseutil /d
integrity checker - isinteg - Fixes things like incorrect item counts in a mailbox.

That concludes the Exchange training.  Overall - it is an email system!

It seems to be a very closed environment, with little ability to customise or enhance.  Both from an administration and client perspective.  A simple example would be:

I would like to be able to extend the AD schema, in the same way we did in Domino, to control who can send receive email.  This allows us to control who can send/receive email and also keep a lot of junk email out of the system.  If I extend the AD schema to store this user attribute, there is no way for the account administrators to modify the value of this attribute using the Users and Computers interface.  Some form of custom interface will have to be developed to modify this attribute.  This is an example of what I mean by a closed system.  Maybe a 3rd party LDAP tool (Softerra for example) may be required too?

       
Another concern, reagrds the format for Internet email addresses.  The custom policies that Exchange offer, don't support our needs!  Looks like more manual work arounds, which unfortunately, will introduce errors.