Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Changing the polling interval for the Exchange FDS

The Exchange 2007 File Distribution Service is responsible for keeping the OAB on the CAS in sync with the mailbox server. The default setting only polls the OAB every 8 hours. This could mean that a change you make doesn’t make it to the Outlook clients until well over a day (if you leave the OAB creation to the default once a day)!

To change this setting to e.g. every hour (60 minutes) use this command:

Get-OabVirtualDirectory| Set-OabVirtualDirectory -pollinterval 60

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Exchange organization reboot issue : blocked emails

When your exchange 2007 organization have multiple servers, since roles should be splitted on different machines, and you need to reboot them, it appears that sometimes emails are blocked.
This can come from the Hub transport server and even if the MS Exchange transport service is set on automatic, is appears not started after reboot.
Just start the Microsoft Exchange Transport service, and all emails will be released.

Unmanaged SAN storage processor (SP)

It could happen that one of the storage processor of your SAN displays as unmanaged in GUI.
This can happen after a SAN reboot and is usually related to the UPS powering this SP.
Since the communication between the UPS and the SAN is broken (not available), the SP goes on unmanaged and disable the cache.
In order to solve this, you'll need to stop the SAN (and everything running on before), stop the UPs, restart the UPS and let it do the check opreations (< 1 minute), and finally start the SAN.
Everything should be ok.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Viewing the Dell Service Tag from Windows

If you ever need to check the Dell Service Tag on a machine from within Windows, run the following command:

wmic bios get serialnumber

To do this remotely you need to add the /node: switch. For example:

wmic /node:<servername> bios get serialnumber