Items specifically related to Exchange 2019
This is a topic that still comes up when doing email investigations. After there has been an issue, we want to perform analysis to determine what may have happened any potentially why certain security controls did not act the way we expected.
With email one example would be around the audit information collected when an Exchange Online transport rule acts upon a message.
It is common to see that ad… Read the rest “Exchange Online Transport Rule Audit”
The Exchange team just posted that the September 2021 updates are going to be slightly delayed. The priority will always be to ship quality updates rather than force it out to meet a specific day.
You can look at the announcement, and Nino's additional comments here:
Delay of September 2021 Cumulative Update for Exchange Server - Microsoft Tech Community
This means that we have a little bit more tim… Read the rest “Is Exchange Fully Updated? If Not, Go Update Now”
Imagine that you have spent weeks planning for your upgrade to Exchange 2019. There are no unsupported down-level versions of Exchange, only Exchange 2016 is present. Those pesky public folders were also taken out behind the farmer's shed never to return. That only taken 15 or so years, but hey life is a journey...
Imagine your surprise when you go to perform step #1 which is extending the… Read the rest “Unable to Prepare Schema For Exchange Server 2019–Forest Functional Level”
Exchange 2019 CU10 has been released to the Microsoft Volume Licensing Center and the public Microsoft Download site! Exchange 2019 has a different servicing strategy than Exchange 2007/2010 and utilises Cumulative Updates (CUs) rather than the Rollup Updates (RU/UR) which were used previously. CUs are a complete installation of Exchange 2019 and can be used to install a fresh server or to upd… Read the rest “Exchange 2019 CU10 Released”
The question "Does Exchange setup automatically run /PrepareSchema?" was something that came up many times in the recent Hafnium remediation activities. This was due to many customers not updating Exchange for multiple years, and being extremely behind on updates. In order to get Exchange updated, it was necessary to perform multiple steps in the upgrade process. Sometimes the /PrepareSchema ta… Read the rest “Does Exchange Setup Automatically Run PrepareSchema?”
When running /PrepareSchema in an Exchange organisation with an existing Exchange Hybrid deployment you may run into an error which states:
"A hybrid deployment with Office 365 has been detected. Please ensure that you are running setup with the /TenantOrganizationConfig switch"
This is shown below:
A similar issue will occur if you specify only /PrepareAD
Note that the /TenantOrganizationConfig switc… Read the rest “TenantOrganizationConfig Required When Preparing Active Directory”
When installing Exchange updates, I place the server into maintenance mode and restart it prior to installing the actual Exchange update. This is due to have being burned many times by other teams or third party tools that conveniently "overlooked" the fact that their setup required the machine to restart. It also provides an opportunity for issues caused by those third party tools to surface be… Read the rest “Unable to Run Exchange Setup–Pending Reboot From a Previous Installation”
It is critical Exchange installations are properly maintained in all regards. In order to stay current with Exchange Cumulative Updates (CUs), it is necessary to read the release notes for a given CU to determine if an update is required for the .NET Framework. Staying current on updates is required to receive full support from Microsoft. Exchange Hybrid supports N and N-1 for on-premises CUs, … Read the rest “Exchange .NET Framework Upgrade – The Unsupported Kangaroo In The Room”
This is a reference post for Exchange 2019 screenshots of the command line installation process. You will note similarities to the Exchange 2016 installation.
Update 30-9-2021 Newer versions of Exchange 2019 have slightly modified the prerequisites and also the original command line options that are shown below. Please see the Exchange 2019 CU11 setup changes post for details.
When adding a TLS certificate on an Exchange server, the inevitable prompt will appear to enquire if you wish to overwrite the default SMTP certificate binding. While the UI in the current versions of Exchange is slightly different, it was basically the same prompt in Exchange 2010 & Exchange 2007.
While the prompt language was the same in Exchange 2007 and newer versions, the way that transpo… Read the rest “Should I Overwrite The Default Exchange SMTP Certificate?”