David Owen's Blog

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"You do not have permission to change your password"

I haven’t posted anything in a while, sorry about that. I’ll try to post more often. :-) We had a call recently regarding users changing their expired password whilst logging on to a computer attached to another domain. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it, almost all of our clients are Windows XP, so our initial response to these sort of queries is to ask the Local IT Administrator to fully patch the client experiencing the problem. Taking an XP client to SP3 usually solves most of the problems listed on TechNet for this particular error. Unfortunately, patching didn’t work in this instance, and we weren’t sure why this was happening, so we logged a call with Premier Support. One of the articles we had missed in our initial investigations was highlighted to us by Microsoft - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555340/en-gb The article explained that we needed to reverse a change that was made on our Domain Controllers by the application of Server 2003 Ser

Delay on Enterprise Vault Web Pages on first access each day.

After deploying a geographically dispersed cluster toward the end of last year, the next thing on my to do list, was to provide archiving services. We use Symantec Enterprise Vault across the organisation, so I set about installing and configuring that. The installation went smoothly and all was working without any major issues. The only issue reported by users was in regard to the search and browse vault web pages, usually viewed through Outlook were taking a long time to load for the first attempt each day. I called Symantec Support and was pointed in the direction of the article below. http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/324255.htm In our case this didn’t apply. This article ( http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/351109.htm ) was closer to our solution, but still not our complete solution. The runtime config below will be familiar to admins who run Exchange 2007 Servers where no internet access is available. For those who are not familiar with certificate signed

Convert Linked Mailboxes to User Mailboxes in Bulk

My organisation has gone through a massive migration project to unify Active Directories and Exchange organisations. As a result of these migrations a lot of mailbox migrations have resulted in a lot of mailboxes ending up as linked mailboxes even though their not. The official TechNet article on this explains how to disconnect the mailbox and re-attach it to the user account correctly as a user mailbox. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201749(EXCHG.80).aspx Another way to make this appear to be corrected is to manually change the “Recipient Type” AD property on the affected mailboxes. This though, is unsupported. Using the official method from Microsoft results in the loss of any specific mailbox information such as SMTP, x400 & x500 addresses, mailbox sizes and any other individual mailbox settings. Only e-mail addresses and mailbox sizes were important to me (I must admit, I forgot about mailbox sizes at first). I came up with the script below that would properly con

Upgrading Delegated Exchange 2007 Clusters to SP2 - FIX

Concerning a previous post “ Upgrading Exchange 2007 Clusters to SP2 – Workaround ”, Microsoft provided a fix for the issue of upgrading an Exchange 2007 Cluster using delegated privileges. Microsoft provided us with a fix that allows this to happen without using the workaround described in the article above. Download the file from here http://downloads.daiowen.co.uk/ExBPA.PreReqs.xml How to use the XML… Copy all the E12SP2 setup files to local disk. Replace the original ExBPA.PreReqs.xml with the one available above. Run the setup from local disk.

Exchange 2007 Public Folder Mail Routing

We had a report recently that mail from outside the Exchange organisation destined for Public Folders was being returned in the form of an NDR, but all other mail was flowing fine. To explain the problem, here’s a little background about the Exchange 2007 topology. We have two HUB servers that handle mail heading inbound and outbound of the organisation. Beneath that we have a lots of exchange deployments at physical sites with varying local configurations. To complicate things we have firewalls sat in front of these other deployments with some more strict than others. As we add more exchange deployments it can be a considerable task getting these firewalls adjusted to allow the new hub transport servers to communicate with the old, usually leading local administrators to notice queues forming on their sites. I had all the information I needed to track the messages, so started by tracking the message at our two hub transports handling mail into and out of the system. The Public Fol

Upgrading Exchange 2007 Clusters to SP2 – Workaround

I posted last month about a problem delegating installs of Exchange 2007 SP2. Delegated Admins will receive an error message stating the following… You must be a member of the 'Exchange Organization Administrators' or 'Enterprise Administrators' group to continue. Have been looking into the issue and have had a case open with Microsoft. Turns out that you only get this issue on a fully patched server. If you try upgrading or installing as a delegated admin on a fresh install of either server 2008 or 2003 you don’t see the problem either with Exchange SP1 or SP2. I haven’t had time to identify exactly what patch causes this yet, if I’ll bother at all. If you have patched your server though, MS came up with this workaround. Disable update checking for the BPA by heading into the registry and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\ExBPA and either creating or modifying a DWORD named “VersionCheckAlways” and set it to ‘0’ Copy the installation files to a local drive and replace S