Adding a new user to exchange? Notice that the new user doesn’t show up in Outlook?

Open up the power shell on your Exchange server (or connect remotely to it), and run the following command:

Update-OfflineAddressBook "Name of Address Book"

Or

Get-OfflineAddressBook | Update-OfflineAddressBook

Then, if you’re in cached mode (most are), you can go to Tools, Send/Receive, and then select Download Address Book
Uncheck Download changes since last Send/Receive and hit OK
Now you should have the new user in your address book!

I remember at my last job I had to upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. It wasn’t that huge of a deal actually. Then I had a customer who wanted to upgrade to 2007. That was a much larger problem as the customer did not have an abundance of hardware/time/patience. In place installations/upgrades are almost always more tedious than a fresh install. Oh well, live and learn.

Anyway, after upgrading my third client to 2007 Exchange, I remember that I had a tool to help with permissions of all/some of the mailboxes. Namely the HR manager required permission to view all of the calendars of every employee. OK, I can do that.

Grab a file from Microsoft called PFDAVAdmin. This stands for Public Folders DAV-based Administration Tool.

Now, I had another problem after installing said program (it’s just an extraction, so don’t worry about it screwing anything up):
Could not expand https://servername/mailboxstore/Username/L...20Folders/: Name cannot begin with the '0' character, hexadecimal value 0x30. Line 1, position 402."

Argh. Someone mentioned to me that I should remove the SSL requirement on the public folders area. Lot of good that does, as the problem was expanding the folders for individual mailboxes. As it turns out, you need .net 1.1 installed. I was trying to run this from the Exchange 2007 Server directly. Runs great from the old Exchange 2003 server.

So, open this program up. Then click File, Connect.
If you can’t figure out what to put under Exchange Server or Global Catalog, then you should find a file called ADChecker (it’s in the Downloads Section)
If you just want to edit permissions of the public folders, keep the radio on Public Folders. I needed to alter the rights for a single mailbox user remotely. So I chose All Mailboxes.
After a brief query time, you should see Mailboxes with a plus sign. Drill down to your user, then Top of Information Store, Then Calendar.
Right-click and select folder permissions.

Next you can click Add and then add a user after searching.
The permission layout is the same as standard public folders for Exchange.

I may or may not clean this up and add more screen shots.

Customer has an Exchange 2007 box that they wanted backed up, but didn’t want to pay for any extra software. Yay.
Set the NTBackup to the First Information Store of the exchange server, did a test backup, and away I went.

Fast forward 2 weeks and now it’s no longer backing up anything worth while. No error from the script either, so I had to dig through the event viewer logs and NTBackup logs (eventvwr, and C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows NT\NTBackup\data)

“Registry Writer” has reported an error 0x800423f4. This is part of System State. The backup cannot continue.

Awesome.

I had previously selected System State AND Exchange’s store to be backed up. As restoring the system state has never yielded me great results (almost a waste of time. almost.) I decided to just uncheck the system state box and only backup Exchange’s Store.

Ran the backup again – this time success.

Customer was upgrading from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. Installed Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 on a new server, ran all the updates, installed Exchange. Started migrating users over to the new server and no issues. Or so we thought.

A couple users had problems retrieving new emails in Outlook. Their iPhone/Blackberry showed the newest emails. Outlook web access showed the newest emails. Even Exchange 2007 showed DELIVERED for the new emails. The only solution to fix this problem at first:

Remove Cached Mode for Exchange
Remove the offending user’s shared mailbox
Magically Mail would start flowing after either of these two steps were done. However, since the problematic users were remotely located, cached mode must be used and the users required the shared mailbox.

The only users complaining had:

Cached Outlook Profiles
Other users mailboxes shared in their profile
Wireless connection to the network

First check (after making sure the email actually went through) was to look in ADSI Edit to verify that the users had proper permissions (you can also check on the client).

Start, Run
adsiedit.msc
Navigate to your Domain, and then your Users group.
Right-click on the user and select Properties
Make sure that homeMDB and homeMTA have your new servername in there

Second was to fix the OST file. We scanpst.exe (program files/microsoft office/office12/scanpst.exe) and repaired any errors.

Third was to start a new profile – we even tried on a test machine to be sure that it wasn’t a local issue.

Nothing worked. Final step (which worked) was to go to the following:

Open Outlook
Navigate to Tools – Account Settings
Click on your Exchange account and then click Change…
Click the More Settings… button
Click on the Advanced tab
Uncheck Download shared folders (excludes mail folders)
Restart Outlook

And here I thought I would be done with Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Oh well.
Basically you’re allowed 2 RDP sessions and 1 console (local) session on win2k server. Server 2003/2008 allow you to use all 3 sessions remotely, which is a definite plus. Easy way to get to the console session of 2003/2008:

Start, Run
mstsc /admin
IP or Name of your server

Easy way on Windows 2000. Uh, THERE IS NO EASY WAY.
Our situation:
2 Windows 2000 Advanced Servers
Located 120 minutes away
Not on the domain (workgroup)
One of the servers had the maximum number of connections
The other server we could login no problem

As long as you have rights (privs) to the admin share (c$) of the computer, you can very easily connect:
1.) I logged into the win2k server that still worked
2.) Pulled up the command prompt
3.) Typed qwinsta /server:192.168.20.150
4.) Typed rwinsta /server:192.168.20.150 sessionid

Basically qwinsta will query for all the active/disconnected RDP sessions on the server. Rwinsta will remove the session id you pick. Check out the picture for more information.

Then just connect as usual.

******EDIT******
OK, so sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake. I forgot how to manage remotely without being part of the domain. Authenticate as a user on that system and you can do it all remotely – ie if BOTH of those servers had max connections, what would I do?

net use /user:usernamehere \\ip_of_the_server\c$
This will prompt you to enter a password for the username you selected
Now you can run the same commands above.

ALSO, it looks like you can use:
query session /server:192.168.20.150
and
reset session 36 /server:192.168.20.150
as those are easier to remember on new systems.

Daemon Tools would not run. I was receiving the error:

This program requires at least Windows 2000 with SPTD 1.60 or higher.
Kernel debugger must be deactivated

Awesome. And it was after I had installed Threatfire and then rebooted.
I tried setting TF to delayed automatic service startup, but still no dice.

Here’s the work around:

Hold Ctrl and right-click on the Threatfire icon in the taskbar tray
Select Exit
Windows Key + R, and type in CMD and hit enter
net stop threatfire
Load Threatfire by opening the program

Supposedly a temporary work around, but it’s been almost 6 months. Apparently you can also delay the startup by using WinPatrol.