Customer had an exchange 2003 box running on a virtual VMWare ESXi infrastructure. After a reboot the store would not mount. Another technician had been checking it out so I came into the game a little late.

After trying various methods to fix the issue, the technician was able to mount the store. Unfortunately there were no mailboxes listed on the store – bad news bears.

The problem was escalated to me and I ran a checkdisk on their drive
chkdsk /r E:
This checkdisk found a few sector corruptions on the primary EDB database file and fixed them. It also found a few miscellaneous table errors and filename issues – which it fixed – but nothing really major besides the EDB file.

Restarted the server and all services came back up. Unfortunately, while mail started to actually flow, I was receiving other eventlog errors:

ESE Database Page Cache – event ID 474. Information Store First Storage Group: The database page read from (file) at offset (offset) failed verification due to a page checksum mismatch. The read operation will fail with error -1018 (0xfffffc06).

Awesome.
Then I got this gem:

MSExchangeIS Mailbox – event ID 1025. An error occurred on database “First Storage Group\Mailbox Store (servername)”. Function name or description of problem: SLINK::EcUpdate Error: Read verification error

Better, no?
Basically it looks like some data corruption had occurred. Now I needed to fix this and get it back up and running ASAP.
Open a command prompt
cd \program files\exchsrvr\bin
eseutil /g "path\to\mdbdata\priv1.edb"
This will check database integrity

/D will defrag mode
/P will repair mode
/C will restore mode
/R will recover mode
/M will file dump mode
/K will checksum check mode
/Y will copy file mode

***EDIT***
Well, looks like I have to do the /R to repair as it came back saying the database was corrupted. /R should only be used if you get a similar message as it attempts to reorganize the database instead of rebuilding from the log files.

I was checking out the recent upgrade to 2010 from 2003 and I noticed the following in the eventlog:

Sender Information: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostingEnvironment+HostingManager/42194754
Exception: System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException: The service ‘/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml’ cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation. The exception message is: Could not find a base address that matches scheme http for the endpoint with binding CustomBinding. Registered base address schemes are [https].. —> System.InvalidOperationException: Could not find a base address that matches scheme http for the endpoint with binding CustomBinding. Registered base address schemes are [https].

This was popping up mostly when someone was logging into OWA for the webmail access, but it also showed up a slightly different way when someone would try to reserve resources (rooms) for meetings.

And here’s the easy fix for me:

remove IIS binding http 80 127.0.0.1
remove IIS binding https 443 127.0.0.1

This might not apply to you, but just make sure you only have ONE binding for each port (80 and 443) and the best practice is to have it bind to any (*)

New place I work recently upgraded from a 2-server Exchange 2003 (1FE and 1BE) to a 4-server Exchange 2010 (CAS and Mailbox, Mailbox, Hub, Edge) environment. Unfortunately some of the upgrade didn’t go quite as planned and there were quite a few issues remaining.

One such issue was when a user would log into OWA (Outlook Web App – or as I still like to call it Outlook Web Access) and attempt to open up the Out Of Office area, they would receive a permission denied. This means the user cannot view the ECP (exchange control panel) area of OWA.

Problem I found: Users did not have a role policy assigned to them.
Shows the role assignment – should show “Default Role Assignment Policy”
get-mailbox MAILBOXNAME | select-object roleassignmentpolicy

If nothing shows, you must set the default policy:
get-mailbox MAILBOXNAME | set-mailbox -roleassignmentpolicy "Default Role Assignment Policy"

shows the current membership roles – should show MyBaseOptions
get-managementroleassignment -roleassignee MAILBOXNAME | fl role

If nothing shows, you must add the base options:
add-rolegroupmember 'MyBaseOptions' -Member MAILBOXNAME

ALL USERS IN DOMAIN – just remove the mailbox name:
get-mailbox | ft name,roleassignmentpolicy
get-mailbox | set-mailbox -roleassignmenpolicy "Default Role Assignment Policy"