Microsoft Exchange and Remote Desktop Services Specialists

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Microsoft Exchange Server and
Blackberry Enterprise Server news, views and fixes.

Farewell Exchange 2003

Today is the day that support for Windows XP ends, but it is also the end of another product that was much loved in its day and even now is still in widespread use, and that is Exchange 2003.   Exchange 2003 was where I really got heavily involved with the Exchange product. I had played around a bit with Exchange 5.5 and 2000 at previous employers, but it was around the time of Exchange 200... [More]

Exchange 2007/2010/2013 Outbound SMTP Banner Testing

Back in 2009 I posted that automated tools like those at mxtoolbox will return false negative results on the SMTP banner tests. (http://semb.ee/banner2007)   This is because the SMTP banner presented for inbound email is different to outbound email.   This is still the case with Exchange 2010 and 2013. You shouldn't try and change the Receive Connector configuration to "fix" this pro... [More]

Stopping Auto Deletion in Mailbox Converted From a Resource

Recently at a client we configured some mailboxes as Resources. It was then decided that they would be better off as shared mailboxes, as they could be used for other tasks. Therefore the mailbox was converted to shared:   set-mailbox mailboxname -type:shared   However any emails sent to the new Shared mailbox were continuing to go in to the Deleted Items folder. This is the sta... [More]

Cross Site DAG Issue When Using A Load Balancer

Just deployed a new Kemp Load Balancer with a client which promptly broke their cross site DAG. Usual horrible error: [PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Status WARNING: Unable to get Primary Active Manager information due to an Active Manager call failure. Error: An Active Manager operation failed. Error The Microsoft Exchange Replication service may not be running on s... [More]

A New Take on the Exchange Management Shell Startup - Keberos Error

I was recently asked to look at an Exchange server giving the common PowerShell connection failure due to Kerberos authentication.  The following error occurred while attempting to connect to the specified Exchange server 'rpi-exchange.rp.local': "The attempt to connect to http://rpi-exchange.rp.local/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: Connecting to the remote server faile... [More]