Jeremy Phillips

It’s been awhile since I posted any updates on what I’m doing with my life.

On the job front, I’ve got exactly 6 more working days left at Microsoft. I’m starting at Azaleos again on Monday February 8th, resuming my role as Director of Operations. Yes, this surprised me as well; it wasn’t something I was planning on. I’m looking forward to managing people instead of bits again.

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I very recently discovered LibraryThing.com, a very cool site where I am slowly cataloging my books. If you’re an avid reader I highly recommend checking it out and adding me as a friend. I always like to see what other people are reading.

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I’m considering going back to school and pursuing my degree with the unique difference that I plan to attend classes this time. Perhaps I’ll learn more obscure facts like how to use the semicolon properly, something I never knew and had to Google.

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I’m still in the process of cleaning my home office. It’s quite a bit less cluttered than it used to be but not nearly as ship shape as it will be when I’m done. No worries though, at this rate it will be immaculate sometime in Q2 2011.

How to Configure Change Password for OWA 2003/2007/2010 Mixed Environments http://bit.ly/8avxgZ

Making sense of Exchange Logs using ExLogAnalyzer http://bit.ly/8zZHIn

How Much The Average American Can Save On Taxes By Having A Business http://bit.ly/88g00b

Choosing a disk configuration for your Exchange Server 2007 storage http://bit.ly/7rSi3z

Personal Marketing and Social Media http://bit.ly/5uPoYC

Microsoft to issue emergency IE patch Thursday http://bit.ly/8SwtEw

Data Privacy Day: 1/28/10 http://bit.ly/5IPhgW

Support for Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 ends on July 13, 2010 http://bit.ly/5YJFuE

I love the new Deployment Assistant http://bit.ly/4Y4Fql

I’ve had a number of clients ask me whether this was possible, especially the ‘restrict contractors to just certain domains’ part.

This is definitely worthwhile knowledge that you should run through in your Exchange 2010 lab. You do have a lab running Exchange 2010, right? (Not that I’m anyone to talk about it, I have a brand new PowerEdge sitting on the floor of my office waiting to be built right now)

You requested it… and we delivered it in Exchange 2010!

One of the most requested items in exchange 2007 was something like this…

…we have 5-12 external domains that we need to allow some users to send to, but prevent sending to all other domains…

Or like this…

…we need a way to allow everyone to send to the internet but restrict members of 'contract workers group' to just certain domains.

This blog post is meant to show how easy it now is to accomplish this oft heard request in Exchange 2010. Transport rules, introduced with Exchange 2007, provided a lot of new options for administration of mail resulting in even more requests for additional functionality. The rules now have new predicates and actions extending the possibilities of what can be done.

In particular, the predicates for address matching that were previously only available on the Edge role are now available for Hub role as well!

For more information about the new predicate and actions read the whole blog post @ You Had Me At EHLO… : Restricting email to the Internet on a per user AND per domain basis.

Ctrl P – The Data Protection Manager Blog! : DPM 2010 Protecting Exchange 2010 DAG in a Single Site.

A very good blog post on using DPM to backup Exchange 2010 DAGs. They cover JBOD vs RAID for the DPM server itself, Point in Time recovery for lagged copies vs DPM and a few reasons why you should consider DPM.

Last Thursday night I had the distinct privilege of participating in a real life Exchange 2010 disaster recovery scenario. Roughly 41,000 mailboxes on 22 databases had the DAG ripped out from underneath them accidentally. When I say ‘ripped out from underneath them’ I mean literally that; everything was removed, including all the cluster resources and mailbox servers. As far as AD was concerned these servers didn’t even exist. All we had left was the .edb files, catalog indexes and log files. The solution? Database portability.

Even though this was essentially a test environment, there were a number of live mailboxes that simply had to be recovered and we wanted to recover them all. The steps we took were rather straightforward;

1 | Find some live mailbox servers that had the spare capacity to mount 22 databases. Split the list of databases to be mounted among them.

2 | For each mailbox server, copy over the database and log directories so we had the data to use.

3 | Perform a soft recovery with eseutil /r on each database/log set to commit any uncommitted log files and ensure we could actually mount the data later in the process.

4 | Create the new mailbox databases: new-mailboxdatabase -name <name> -server <server> -EdbFilePath <path to recovery folder, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverDB1\<name of original edb>.edb> -LogFilePath <path to logs, e.g. c:\RecoverDBs\RecoverLogs1>

Pro Tip: Use a new name for the database. If the old database was named DAG1-DB001, you might use DAG1-RecoveryDB001.

5 | Set the newly created databases to allow file restore: set-mailboxdatabase <db name> -AllowFileRestore:$true

6 | Copy in the database, logs and catalog data to the correct folders (those specified in step 4)

7 | Mount the databases one at a time: mount-database <DatabaseName>

8 | Once the database is mounted we can now re-home all the users with mail data there: get-mailbox -database <OriginalDatabaseName> | ?{$_.ObjectClass -NotMatch ‘(SystemAttendantMailbox|ExOldDbSystemMailbox)’} | set-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName>

9 | If you’re running with multiple copies then keep in mind that you’ve only got one live copy of the new database. You can either add a copy of the new database or do what we did and move them to databases on your new DAG that (hopefully) has multiple copies already. If you choose to go the route of moving them to existing healthy databases the command is: get-mailbox -database <RecoveryDatabaseName> | new-moverequest -TargetDatabase <HealthyDatabaseName>

Comments and/or questions are welcome in the comments. I just wrote this from memory so if I missed anything along the way please let me know.

I like to try new things and back in October I decided to try moving my blog off of WordPress. Initially I tried Tumblr, which was decent but didn’t have all the features I was looking for. Then I found Posterous and was generally pretty happy with having my blog there. It was free, fast, stable and had all the features I wanted initially. Then I started having issues; e-mailing a picture would result in 3 or 4 identical posts with only 1 post having a good copy of the picture. I also experienced occasional timeout issues when hitting my site but can’t really complain about that as it’s free.

I figured if I was moving back to WordPress I would take the opportunity to move everything over to jerephil.com, a domain name I registered about a year ago. I’ve been using jerephil as a username for the past two years or so and I have yet to find a site where the username is taken. So everything, except some of the posts I made on Posterous, is now located here. The important ones are done and I’ll be moving the pictures across as time allows.