After using various types, architectures and generations of computers over the years there is always the habit of “you go to what you know!” In other words once you figure out a solution to an issue, you then use that repeatedly in the future as you know the process/steps involved. This adroitly describes me when it comes to doing certain command line tasks. If I were being a bit… Read the rest “PowerShell Input Output Escapades”
I was recently reminded of a simple yet effective Event Viewer filtering tip. If you have thousands of event entries that are pollution/flooding the log it becomes very difficult to see the actual real issues.
For example this tip has proved very useful when the application event log is full of these types of noise:
Quick post for a Friday!
A customer had an “interesting” issue where the DAG networks were not being displayed inside the Exchange Management Console. The underlying reason is because the implemented firewalls between Exchange servers, and then restricted network traffic between Exchange and the DCs. This is not a supported situation. For details on the firewall restricting traffic aspect please… Read the rest “How To Rename DAG Network Using PowerShell”
In a little under 6 months, multiple products will experience a support life cycle change. As indicated by the space shuttle being readied, the countdown has started and the dates are set. Make sure you are aware of what is happening on the 13th of January 2015.
2014 has already been a busy year for product transitions, with Exchange 2003, Office 2003 and Windows XP Pro all exiting out of extended… Read the rest “Save The Date – End of Exchange 2010, Windows 7 and 2008 Mainstream Support – T Minus 6 Months”
When resolving issues with on-premises Exchange sometimes the issue may be directly within Exchange, other times the root cause may lie outside Exchange. Depending upon the exact nature of the case we may have to investigate network switches, load balancers or storage. When Exchange is virtualized then the hypervisor and it’s configuration also may require attention.
This was the case with a rece… Read the rest “VMware Issues With Exchange DAG”
Whilst working on a customer’s Exchange 2010 DAG issue, I wrote a quick script to quickly grab some performance monitor counters from all of their Exchange servers. The issue that we were investigating was related to discarded packets when the VM was running on a certain hypervisor host. The customer had moved their Exchange VMs to a new host and after doing so they were experiencing cluster iss… Read the rest “Retrieving Packets Received Discarded Perfmon Counter From Multiple Servers”
Want to grow and expand your technical, customer and soft skills? Do you dream of working with the product groups at Microsoft to influence future product updates? Want to have fun while delivering true mission critical support to top tier Microsoft customers? Then you are in luck!
Microsoft Canada GBS is looking for Exchange and Office 365 experts. Micros… Read the rest “PFE Canada Is Hiring For Exchange And Office 365!”
AD FS 2012 R2 provides an interesting feature called Extranet Lockout Protection, where the intent is to protect AD accounts from malicious lockout from external access attempts. Previous versions of AD FS had no native mechanism to protect AD from such hammering attempts. For details on the feature please review this post.
One issue that can occur when extranet lockout pro… Read the rest “AD FS 2012 R2 – An Error Occurs When BadPwdCount Not Set”
After a recent video driver update, my corporate Outlook client started to do some strange things. Within Office 2013, the screen output would be distorted. Menu bars were not painted properly until I mouse-over them again, or moved Office programs around. Other times the display would look corrupted and the navigation tree would not be properly rendered.
Update 16-7-2014: Adding link to Office 2… Read the rest “Outlook 2013 Distorted Display Issues”
In a previous post we saw the Microsoft requirements for the exclusions that must be added to file system AV on Exchange servers. In a recent CritSit, basically an uber urgent support request where the customer is down or as good as down, I also got to examine some of the other causes for file system AV not being correctly configured for Exchange.
In the aforementioned post the majority of the… Read the rest “Exchange and AntiVirus Exclusions – Still A Critical Conversation”