Accident deleted Active Directory Object – now what?

Dear all,

Good day. Its almost holiday period. Got a call from one of our customer, situation is like this:

The backup of the system state is over the tumbstone mode, 60 days. No more backup after that. He accidently delete an OU, which consists of three departments users.

Normally, we shall say, please use authoritative restore. Yes, this is the best and safe way if you have a recent backup. What if you dont? Does it mean all your object now gone?

The beauty of AD is, it keeps its deleted objects for 60 days by default, you will be able to change it via registry.

Normally, to "undelete" an object from AD can be tedious. We would like to share a tool from Quest software. We would like to thank Prakash, the Malaysia Champ who share this with us.

You can use this tool for FREE, only valid for 6 months. However, as long as it works and save your day!

http://www.quest.com/object_restore_for_active_directory/

Accessing other users mailboxes using administrators

Dear Folks,

Good day. Still remember Exchange 5.5 days where you can access other users’ mailboxes using administrator account? Too bad - it doesn’t work in Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003.

Recently, there are few of the companies required to perform this, randomly check on employee's mailboxes; it’s a company policies.

How to do so? Again, Support Tools - best practices, we always encourage administrators to install windows support tools to every server that you had in the network - you simply won’t know when you need it.

1) Go to ADSI Edit using MMC
2) Locate under configuration partition
3) CN=Services, CN=Microsoft Exchange,
4) Right click the organization name, CN=Orgname
5) Click on Security Tab
6) You will notice administrator has "Deny" permissions on the "Receive As" and "Send As" properties. Once you uncheck those you would be able to access all mailboxes using the Administrator account.

NOTE: We always recommend to use Groups rather than individual account to assign/delegate any permission.

There you go...

Exchange DB Defrag

Why you need to perform defrag on Exchange DB?

Basically, you have reached 16GB DB size for Exchange 5.5 Std Exchange 2000 Std and Exchange 2003 Std pre SP2. Before doing such, something you will need to know:

You will need over double the size of the database to do an offline defrag. This size needs to be in on one drive.

Is there risk? You are working on a database file, so yes there is a risk.

If your DB grow till near 16GB before you perform such action, please visit MSFT website, temporary increase the store to 17gb: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=828070

Although Exchange 2003 standard now support 75GB, upgrading to Enterprise Edition is the primary solution. This is what you need to aim for long term. In addition, Exchange Enterprise will give you more features, like supporting cluster, support multiple storage groups and stores, up to 4 storage groups with 20 databases.

Just an advice for shorter term, limits on the size of the mailbox is probably something that you need to look at. Try to encourage users to get rid of some email, archiving or deleting what isn't required. Some users can just store non office stuff in the email, eg: movies, MP3 ++

How to perform defrag? Short answer is eseutil /d. Please visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254132/ before performing such action.

Lastly, we always encourage to offline backup the DB in two locations.

Exchange 2007 licensing - something you need to know

Just had lunch with Microsoft Malaysia Exchange in-charge person. Knowing some changes about licensing. Think its good for us to share:

1) Exchange 2007 Std, Ent server license
2) Exchange 2007 now got Std and Ent Client Access License as mentioned in the past post
3) Outlook license that comes with Exchange CAL is now no longer valid, which previously valid in Exchange Server 2003

Knowing these will definitely change the strategies on how to think for customer, bringing value added to them.

Netsh command adding primary and secondary DNS

Currently, we are doing a migration for a company. They prefer to use static IP, which give us a challenge on how to modify the TCP/IP setting with the minimum effort.

Just a share on how we perform this, take a while for us to figure out how to add in secondary DNS using netsh, a cool command that available in Windows 2000, XP and 2003.

command is like this:

netsh interface ip set address local static 10.1.2.10 255.255.255.0 10.1.2.254

netsh interface ip set dns local static 10.1.1.1

netsh interface ip add dns local 10.1.1.2

If you want to change back to DHCP,

netsh interface ip set address local dhcp

Hope this help others, which took us 2 days.