Category Archives: Microsoft

Lost your disconnected mailboxes on Exchange 2007?

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So you’re happily clicking and typing away, and you need to relink a mailbox to another AD user.  So you do the obvious:

  • Go into the Exchange 2007 Management Console (or Shell)
  • Find the mailbox in the Recipient Configuration
  • Write down the server the mailbox is stored
  • Disconnect the mailbox from the original AD user
  • Get a list of disconnected mailboxes on the server you wrote down

Only to find that the mailbox is not listed. Panic!

Did you forget to check the Deletion Settings on the mailbox store? No, on second glance they are the default 30 days, so the disconnected mailbox should still be available.

But, wait… On Exchange 2003, didn’t you run the Cleanup Agent to find disconnected mailboxes?

No such a thing in Exchange 2007, or is there?

Yes there is.  Clean-Mailboxdatabase is your cmdlet and friend.  Run Clean-Mailboxdatabase <databasename> in an Exchange Management Shell and reload your list of disconnected mailboxes.

You saved the day!  Or at least Exchange saved your job ;).

So next time:

  1. Get-Mailbox john@contoso.com | Format-Table Name, Database
  2. Disable-Mailbox john@contoso.com
  3. Clean-MailboxDatabase “Mailbox Server\Mailbox Database Storagegroup Name”
  4. Connect-Mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database” -Identity “John Peoples”   -User john@fabrikam.com

Windows clients forget their domain after you reset their snapshot?

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Ever run into a problem where you revert a domain member server or Windows XP domain client toa previously taken snapshot, and when trying to log on the domain, the logon fails?

I did in 2007, and never really thought of it until I ran into the following article 1006764 on the VMWare knowledge base.

The cause is very simple, and so is the solution: Member servers and clients have, just like users, accounts with passwords. If set up like this, these passwords are reset every set period. If you revert a machine back to an old snapshot, chances are that the password stored in the snapshot is not up to date with the password stored in Active Directory, and hence, Active Directory does not allow the machine to log on again.

Ever run into a problem where you revert a domain member server or Windows XP domain client toa previously taken snapshot, and when trying to log on the domain, the logon fails?

I did in 2007, and never really thought of it until I ran into the following article on the VMWare knowledge base: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=1006764&sliceId=1

The cause is very simple, and so is the solution: Member servers and clients have, just like users, accounts with passwords. If set up like this, these passwords are reset every set period. If you revert a machine back to an old snapshot, chances are that the password stored in the snapshot is not up to date with the password stored in Active Directory, and hence, Active Directory does not allow the machine to log on again.

Restoring SharePoint sites, doesn’t!

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So you’ve set up yourself a nice farm of production, testing and acceptance SharePoint servers, and you want to build a new test server.

You make a backup through the Central Administration website, and on your soon to be testing server, you restore the backup.

And then you want to connect the restored Content database, only to discover that SharePoint claims that this database does not contain any sites… Oops? Continue reading →

Moving stuff breaks stuff

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If you’re toying around with SharePoint and want to move a site to another location, you might run into what I’ve run into: broken Lookup field links.

SharePoint Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 feature 20 server templates you can integrate within your SharePoint infrastructure with the command line utility stsadm.exe.

This command line utility also allows you to move sites. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) does not have any features to really move sites, and so the advised way to move sites within and over WSS web farms is to use stsadm.exe export and import operations to export a given site, and import it on another location.

For instance, exporting a site from your WSS web farm goes somewhat like this:

stsadm.exe -o export -url http://mysharepoint/site/subsite -filename subsite.bak

Importing this site back into your WSS web farm goes like this:

stsadm.exe -o import -url http://mysharepoint/subsite -filename subsite.bak

You now have moved your subsite to the root site.  Or did you? Continue reading →

Search Scopes not visible in Search dropdown

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When you have rolled out your Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server or Windows Sharepoint Services together with Microsoft Search Server, you probably want to be able to search all sites through any search field on any site.  But you still only see “This Site” as the only scope to select.

This is not fun.

Continue reading →