Monthly Archives: November 2010

Tech Ed 2010 Tuesday November 9th & Wednesday November 10th

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Well after somewhat of a disappointing start due to cutbacks (we got some sort of a laundry bag this year) and some very hungry vendors & partners in the exhibition hall (they ate the entire lunch of the pre conference delegates)* I’ve spend two very busy days at Tech Ed Europe.

* I should return the favor by getting a vast amount of high quality T-Shirts and other swag but I don’t have the time. I should outsource this but Azure is not yet offering a swag hunting as a service (SHAAS) in the cloud.

First of all I did a lot of sessions on Lync, SCVMM vNext, High Availability, Virtualization, Exchange, …. and in between I had some very informational discussions with storage vendors (I still have some to go) and apart from the technical info it’s fun to see how they deal with critical customer feedback or doubts.

Another fun part was running into twitter and blog acquaintances. Pretty cool people in the IT world. Helpful, easy going, very knowledgeable and fun guys and gals.

The TLC (Technical Learning Center) was staffed very well with a bunch of experts, both MVP’s, partners and Microsoft personnel. I had very engaging and motivating talks with lots of them.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager vNext is looking very promising. But beyond the publicly available information I’m under NDA.

I do think they should watch the quality levels of their sessions. Either we need more 400 level session or we need to deal with the inflation going on. The 400 seems to be new 300 sometimes. another option would be introducing 500 level sessions Winking smile

This post will be posted with some delay as I have no internet where I’m writing this

Tech Ed 2010 Sunday November 7th–Monday November 8th

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The railways made a small effort to delay us but we got to the airport in time. The flight was swift and I dozed off most of the time. Took a cab to the IBIS Messe hotel and checked in. I got a smokers room. Not good! I opened the window and let the air flow in. Messe couldn’t change the room and claimed that they didn’t know I was not a smoker. Well I only booked in June … not long enough to even ask I guess. Time to get out of here and get to the Messe to register. The weather is gray, and rainy.

Well the Tech Ed 2010 Europe bag was a let down. Probably the worst bag ever (not counting the silly trolleys in 2002) and not something that will be of much use during or after the event.

There was no access to the communications net Sunday and there is no wireless cover in the reception hall so we all cleared out fast.

Tonight I’ll have dinner with some colleagues and tomorrow I’m doing the Lync pre conference work shop. After that it’s welcome drink at the exhibitors hall where I’ll meet up with some mates and connections. Around 20:00 it’s dinner time with some of our Microsoft representatives.

I’ll try to put out some more info when possible. So watch this space and twitter.

Exchange 2010 Public Folder Worries At Customer: No existing ‘PublicFolderProxyInformation’ matches the following Identity

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A customers was recently using the EMC GUI in their Exchange 2010 environment, having a look a the public folder properties when they got this error:

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Microsoft Exchange
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Can’t log on to the Exchange Mailbox server ‘DAGMBX.demolab.com’. No existing ‘PublicFolderProxyInformation’ matches the following Identity: ‘demolabHeadQuartersFincanceDepartmentFiscalUnit’. Make sure that you specified the correct ‘PublicFolderProxyInformation’ Identity and that you have the necessary permissions to view ‘PublicFolderProxyInformation’.. It was running the command ‘Get-MailPublicFolder -Identity ”demolabHeadQuartersFincanceDepartmentFiscalUnit” -Server ‘DAGMBX.demolab.com”.
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OK  
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Hey … when did this start?  They never complained about this before, but did they ever use it.This probably was actually the first time they tried to look/edit the public folder permissions after doing the following over the past month and in this particular order:

  1. Moving to Exchange 2010 SP1
  2. Removing the last Exchange 2007 servers from the organization.

Now I know about a bug that exist and that was recently blogged about by Dan Rowley in Exchange 2010 get-mailpublicfolder name returns No existing ‘PublicFolderProxyInformation’. The point is that there should be a mailbox database mounted on the server that has the System Attendant mailbox associated with it.  However, this is not the case here.  The mailbox servers are member of a DAG and all of them host a copy of the PF. The replication runs fine, users can work with them, the remaining Outlook 2003 users report no issues. But there is more in that blog: “Basically the work around is to mount a mailbox store on the server that is generating the error, or if there is a database already mounted – verify the system attendant is properly configured to point to a valid homemdb.” Now that last point is interesting and indeed that was the issue here. On two members of the DAG the homeMDB attribute was not set. Now what could be the root cause of this? I don’t know, certainly not in this case. All things have been done by the book … Ah well, luckily the fix is not very difficult. We need to put a valid entry in the homemdb. In this case we’ll take the value of the DAG member that had it filled in. This seems to be the most recently created database in the DAG. In Exchange 2010 this is done as described below. Note we have a DAG here, so we can work with any database that has a valid copy on the server(s) in question.

How to check the homeMDB attribute value:

  • Start ADSI Edit and navigate to CN=Configuration,DC=,DC=,DC=/Services/Microsoft Exchange//Administrative Groups/Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)//Servers/MBXServerWithIssue
  • Right-click Microsoft System Attendant, and then click Properties to display the  Attributes list and find the homeMDB attribute.
  • If the homeMDB attribute has a value make sure  it points to a valid mailbox database. If the value of the homeMDB attribute is empty (not set) or incorrect you need to fix this.

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How Fix the homeMDB attribute value:

  • In ADSI Edit navigate to Start ADSI Edit and navigate to CN=Configuration,DC=,DC=,DC=/Services/Microsoft Exchange//Administrative Groups/Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/Databases."
  • Right-click a mailbox database that is local (NON DAG) or has a valid copy on the server (DAG) , select Properties and in  the Attributes list, select the distinguishedName, and then click View.
  • Copy the value of the distinguishedName attribute and close the dialogs

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NOTE in this particular case we can copy the value that was filled in the homeMDB attribute on one of the DAG members. You might not have one set in any.

  • Right-click Microsoft System Attendant, and then click Properties to get to the Attributes list, click homeMDB, and then choose Edit
  • In the Value box, paste the value that you copied form the distinguishedName attribute
  • Close the dialog boxes and exit ADSI Edit

When you’ve don this you’ll find following entry in the application event viewer:

Log Name:      Application

Source:        MSExchangeSA

Date:          11/2/2010 3:25:59 PM

Event ID:      9159

Task Category: General

Level:         Warning

Keywords:      Classic

User:          N/A

Computer:      DAGMBX.demolab.com

Description:

Microsoft Exchange System Attendant has detected that the system attendant object in the DS has been modified. System Attendant needs to restart the Microsoft Exchange Free Busy Publishing Service.

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After that, I wait 10 minutes to get AD replicated and make sure to close the EMC and start it again and voila, it’s fixed.