Customer’s normally find the problem with connecting to port #25 after changing the IP address on the Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 servers, if the SMTP Virtual sever was bound to a specific IP and this could cause all inbound mails to the Exchange server to stop.

For Example, Let’s consider an Exchange Server on which the SMTP Virtual Server is bound to a specific IP address. When we change the IP address from the network connections without changing the Exchange SMTP VS configuration, will result in this problem.

This issue is caused due to the changes made to the Default SMTP Virtual server on the Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 servers, which gets updated to Active Directory directly and then to IIS metabase. But this will not work as expected for SMTP virtual server IP address change, where the IP address is manually altered through the network connection on the Exchange 2000 / 2003 server.

To Work around this issue, we have 2 ways:

==============================================================================================================

A) For Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 server.

Manually change the Default SMTP virtual server IP address configuration to use the new IP address assigned to system or change it to “All Unassigned” under General tab and restart Simple Mail Transfer Protocol service.

How to change an IP Address configuration to use new IP address or “All unassigned” for Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 SMTP Virtual server:-

To assign an IP address to your SMTP virtual server, follow these steps:

1. On the Start menu, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.

2. Double-click Administrative Groups.

3. Double-click First Administrative Group.

NOTE: If you have changed the name of the default administrative group or Installed the exchange server in other administrative group, expand the appropriate node for that administrative group.

4. Double-click Servers and Protocol container and find the default SMTP virtual server on any server.
Click the virtual server that you want to configure.

5. On the Action menu, click Properties.

6. On the General tab, click to select either new IP address assigned or “All Unassigned” from the drop down.

7. Finally restart the Simple Mail Protocol Service.

8. Test the SMTP connectivity using telnet command.

==============================================================================================================

B) For IIS SMTP server.

Manually changing the IP address under network connection resets the SMTP virtual server IP configuration from the assigned IP address to “All Unassigned”. But it will not allow any connection with new or old IP addresses.

Change the SMTP virtual server IP configuration to use the new IP address and then restart the SMTP service to connect using new IP address.

How do we change IP Address configuration for IIS SMTP virtual server.

To assign an IP address to your SMTP virtual server, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Services Manager. Alternatively, start the IIS snap-in.

2. Right-click on Default SMTP Virtual Server, and then click Properties.

3. Click the General tab. Assign the new IP address to the SMTP virtual server to respond to connection requests.

4. Finally Restart the Simple Mail Protocol Service.

5. Test the SMTP connectivity using telnet command.

==============================================================================================================

Repro Steps

1. Repro for Exchange 2003 server And also attaching the snap shot for your reference.

    On the Start menu, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Exchange, and then click System Manager.

2. Double-click Administrative Groups.

3. Double-click First Administrative Group.

NOTE: If you have changed the name of the default administrative group or Installed the exchange server in other administrative group, expand the appropriate node for that administrative group.

4. Double-click Servers and Protocol container and find the default SMTP virtual server on any server.

5. Click the virtual server that you want to configure.

6. On the Action menu, click Properties.

7. On the General tab, click to select IP address assigned for the system from the drop down box.

8. Restart the Simple Mail Protocol Service.

9. Test the SMTP connectivity using telnet command. ( it will connect successfully)

10. Click Start, point to Control Panel , and click Network Connections

11. Right-click the local area connection that you want to modify and then click Properties.

12. In the This connection uses the following items box, click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) , and then click Properties . The Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog box appears.

13. Change IP address and close the window and reboot the box if requested.

14. Test the SMTP connectivity using telnet command. ( it will fail to connect)

More Information
=============

SMTP virtual server on standalone windows 2000 servers automatically changes SMTP Virtual server IP configuration to use “All Unassigned” if we change the IP address manually in Network Connection, but would again result in the above problem.

Srinivas Santhanam,

Senior Support Engineer, Exchange Server Team

Reviewed by

Arindam Thodkar,

Support Escalation Engineer, Exchange Server Team]]> https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/exchangeserverfaq/exchange-2007-general-questions-and-answers Tue, 04 May 2010 08:07:24 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/exchangeserverfaq/2010/05/04/exchange-2007-general-questions-and-answers/ Question 1>

So, many times I have been asked that Exchange 2007 SCC (Single Copy Cluster) – why can’t a hub transport role be installed on it?

Answer 1>

By default, connections to Hub Transport servers are automatically load balanced if more than one Hub Transport server is deployed in an Active Directory site. If one Hub Transport server is unavailable, the operational Hub Transport servers continue to accept connections. If all Hub Transport servers in an Active Directory site are unavailable, messages are queued until a Hub Transport server becomes available or the messages expire.

Load balancing of outbound connections to remote domains is achieved by specifying more than one Hub Transport server in the same Active Directory site as a source server for the Send connector. Load balancing does not occur when the source servers for a Send connector are located in different Active Directory sites.

So we do not need to and we cannot install HUB on SCC or CCR.

Exchange 2007 cluster setup is an integral part of the Exchange 2007 setup program, there is no need to install exchange and then configure the exchange server for the cluster. Once the MSCS is installed Exchange setup will detect that successfully and provide the option to install either Cluster Continuous Replication or a Single Copy Cluster in an Active clustered mailbox role or passive clustered mailbox role.

High availability for Exchange 2007 Hub Transport, Edge Transport, Client Access, and Unified Messaging server roles is achieved through a combination of server redundancy, Network Load Balancing, DNS round robin, as well as proactive server, service, and infrastructure management.

In general, you can achieve high availability for HUB Server Role using the following strategies and technology:

You can deploy multiple Hub Transport servers for internal transport high availability. Resiliency has been designed into the Hub Transport, as well as the Mailbox Submission Service on Mailbox servers, for deployment of Multiple Hub Transport servers.

Question2>

In a CCR environment, if I send a message to another mailbox on the same cluster, does it have to go out on the network to a hub transport and then back in again to the mailbox? If so, why?

Answer2>

Yes, If a message is sent to another mailbox on the same cluster, it does have to go out on the network to a hub transport server. This procedure lets us use the new feature named Transport Dumpster of HUB Transport server.

The bulk of the lost data that occurs during an automatic recovery is subsequently automatically recovered by a Hub Transport server feature called the Transport Dumpster. The transport dumpster is a required component for CCR deployments. The transport dumpster takes advantage of the redundancy in the environment to reclaim some of the data impacted by the failover. Specifically, Hub Transport servers maintain a queue of recently delivered mail.

This queue is bound by the amount of time mail is kept and the total space used. When a failover is experienced that isn’t lossless, CCR on the clustered mailbox server automatically requests every Hub Transport in the Active Directory Site to resubmit mail from the transport dumpster queue. The information store automatically deletes the duplicates and re-delivers mail that was lost.

The transport dumpster is only enabled for CCR. It is not enabled for local continuous replication or single copy clusters. The necessary condition for an e-mail to be retained in the transport dumpster is that it has at least 1 recipient whose mailbox is on a clustered mailbox server in a CCR environment.

The transport dumpster is designed to help protect against data loss by providing an administrator with the option to configure CCR such that the clustered mailbox server will automatically come online on another node, with limited amount of data loss. When this happens the system automatically re-delivers all the recent e-mails sent to users on this server, by taking advantage of the transport dumpster where these e-mails are still stored.

This helps to prevent data loss in most situations. Situations in which data loss is not mitigated by the transport dumpster includes:

- Drafts folder for any Microsoft Outlook clients in online mode.

- Appointments, contact updates, property updates, tasks, and task updates.

- Outgoing mail that is in transit from the client to Hub Transport. There is a period of time during which the e-mail only exists on the sender’s mailbox server.

In Exchange 2007 SP1, the transport dumpster feature has been improved:

Support for LCR   The transport dumpster now includes support for LCR deployments. Unlike CCR, in which the request for transport dumpster redelivery is an automatic part of the recovery process, the process is manual in an LCR environment. The Restore-StorageGroupCopy cmdlet has been updated in Exchange 2007 SP1 to include the transport dumpster resubmission request. Thus, when an administrator activates a passive copy of a storage group in an LCR environment using the Restore-StorageGroupCopy cmdlet, the transport dumpster submission request occurs as part of the activation process.

Question 3>

If hub transport can’t be installed in a cluster, can it be installed on the physical nodes of the cluster? If not, why?

Answer 3>

No, it cannot be installed on the physical nodes of the cluster, because Exchange 2007 cluster setup is an integral part of the Exchange 2007 setup program, there is no need to install exchange and then configure the exchange server for the cluster. Once the MSCS is installed Exchange setup will detect that successfully and provide the option to install either Cluster Continuous Replication or a Single Copy Cluster in an Active clustered mailbox role or passive clustered mailbox role.

Question 4>

The transaction log size has been reduced from 5MB to 1MB, is it possible to increase it back to 5MB?

Answer 4>

No, It is not possible to increase it back to 5 MB and that’s the another change in Exchange Server 2007, that the transaction log files are now 1MB instead of 5MB as was the case in previous versions of Exchange. So what’s the reason behind this decision? Well in previous versions of Exchange if a crash destroyed the last few log files that hadn’t been committed to the database yet, you would need to restore or repair the database to have it mounted again. Exchange Server 2007 introduces a new feature called Lost Log Resilience (or LLR in short) which will hold the last few log files in memory until the database is shut down. This means that you will never have a case where part of for example log file 100 has been written to the database, but part of log file 99 hasn’t. The benefit of this is that if you don’t have anything against losing the last few log files, you can tell Exchange to simply throw away the data and mount the database.

So the reason why the log files has been reduced to 1MB is to reduce LLR exposure. Now if you lose the last log, it costs up to 1MB of the most recent data instead of 5MB.

Another improvement worth mentioning is that the log file sequence numbers now can go above 1 million. As you might be aware previous versions of Exchange had a limit of 1 million, so if a database had been running long enough and generated a million logs, you had to shut it down and start over from log #1 ("reset the log sequence"). This would happen every few years for most databases. With the smaller log sizes and the increasing amount of messages passing through most databases, the Exchange Product group decided 2 billion log files (per storage group!) would be a better maximum log number.

The log file size is changed from default 5MB to 1MB to support the continuous replication features in Exchange 2007. This reduces the window of data loss to significantly lower. In the ratio of 1:5.

Question 5>

Our servers create 1000’s of transaction logs per day, so as the transaction logs file size is reduced to 1 MB from 5 MB, won’t creating five times the number have an impact on the performance of the systems?

Answer 5>

No, because the in Exchange 2007 the generated log is 5 Times smaller than the previous version of exchange.

In fact we decreased the transaction log size to minimize the amount of data that can be out of sync between two copies of the Storage Group, for Example in CCR. This comes into play when, let's say, the production database hard drive crashes and you then need to take action to start the SG from the copy. Smaller transaction logs will give you a better chance of less data loss.

Jagmeet Singh,

Senior Support Engineer, Exchange Server Team

Reviewed by

M Sivagami Sundari,

Technical Lead, Exchange Server Team

By default, user’s CASMailbox setting will look similar to the screen shot below ( Run “Get-CasMailbox alias |FL” to get the output ).

If any attribute starting with OWA* is set (except OWAPremiumClientEnabled) then we could see the rest of attribute getting changed to false.

E.g Get-Casmailbox Testian | Set-CasMailbox – OWAUMIntegrationEnabled $false.

Then run Get-Mailbox Testian | FL and look at the following output.

We could see the “OWAPremiumClientEnabled” attribute changed, it would be set to false along with other OWA related settings.

To workaround this issue, Please run

1.Get-CASMailbox  | Set-CASMailbox –OWA* : $True.

Or to enable only Premium Version of OWA access

2.Get-CASMailbox  | Set-CASMailbox – OWAPremiumClientEnabled : $True

This, because after we run Get-CASmailbox  | Set-Casmailbox – OWAJunkEmailEnabled : $True other OWA-attributes are set to false with only the OWAJunkEmailEnabled attribute as True.

Srinivas Santhanam,

Senior Support Engineer, Exchange Server Team

Reviewed by

Arindam Thodkar,

Support Escalation Engineer, Exchange Server Team

M Sivagami Sundari,

Technical Lead, Exchange Server Team

Data Protection Manager System State backups fail for any protected Exchange server that has Forefront Protection for Exchange Server 2010 installed and running.  

For example, If I initiate a system state backup on Exchange 2010 server, it fails with the below error:

C:\Users\admin>wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backupTarget:d:

wbadmin 1.0 - Backup command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2004 Microsoft Corp.
Starting to back up the system state [22/03/2010 11:25]...
Retrieving volume information...
This will back up the system state from volume(s) Local Disk(C:) to d:.
Do you want to start the backup operation?

[Y] Yes [N] No y

Creating a shadow copy of the volumes specified for backup...
Summary of the backup operation:
------------------
The backup of the system state failed [22/03/2010 11:25].
Log of files successfully backed up:
C:\Windows\Logs\WindowsServerBackup\Backup-22-03-2010_11-25-21.log
Log of files for which backup failed:
C:\Windows\Logs\WindowsServerBackup\Backup_Error-22-03-2010_11-25-21.log
A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation failed. Please check "VSS" and "SPP" application event logs for more information.
ERROR - A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation error has occurred: (0x800423f0)

We can also find the following events in the Application log:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        FSCVSSWriter
Date:          22/03/2010 11:25:23
Event ID:      11003
Task Category: (11)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      BSPINFN0201.cad.local
Description:
Microsoft Forefront Protection VSS Writer failed when preparing for backup. Writer instance: FSCVSSWriter Error code: 0x00000000

Log Name:      Application
Source:        VSS
Date:          22/03/2010 11:25:23
Event ID:      8229
Task Category: None
Level:         Warning
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      BSPINFN0201.cad.local
Description:
A VSS writer has rejected an event with error 0x800423f0, The shadow-copy set only contains only a subset of the volumes needed to correctly backup the selected components of the writer.
Changes that the writer made to the writer components while handling the event will not be available to the requester. Check the event log for related events from the application hosting the VSS writer.

From the Events, the FSCVSSWriter is causing the issue.

This issue can be resolved in two ways,

1. Stop the Microsoft forefront server protection VSS writer service (FSCVSSWRITER) before the system state backup and start the service after it is completed.

2. For DPM 2010, we can edit the C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Bin\LHSystemStateBackup.cmd file on the production server .Please contact PSS support to modify the config file.

Niyaz Mohamed,

Senior Support Engineer, Exchange Server Team

Reviewed by

Arindam Thodkar,

Support Escalation Engineer, Exchange Server Team

M Sivagami Sundari,

Technical Lead, Exchange Server Team

Since IIS SMTP maintain configuration details in Metabase, we could not export and import SMTP configuration easily from an IIS SMTP to another IIS SMTP virtual server.

But, when Exchange 2000 or 2003 is installed, Exchange Server use DS2MB (Directory services to Metabase) to replicate SMTP configuration details to Metabase and it allowed us to easily export and import relay and connection setting from Active Directory configuration partition database and import to anther server Exchange 2000 or 2003 server without any issue.

Below instruction would guide us on “How to easily export and import stand alone IIS SMTP virtual server Relay / Connection to another IIS SMTP server which is not installed with Exchange Server 2000 or 2003.

Source IIS SMTP server’s IP relay Configuration.

Please open Metabase Explorer on source IIS server and Expand SMTPSVC folder from hierarchy like shown below. ( note :you can get Metabase Explorer by installing IIS resource kit)

Highlight SMTP virtual server number from where we would like to export the configuration.

Right Click and select Export to File.

Save that SMTP virtual server configuration to file with specified location.

Protect the file with password while saving to specific location.

Exporting SMTP virtual server confirmation is completed.

Importing Relay or Connection setting from IIS SMTP virtual server

Please go to the second IIS SMTP virtual server and Open IIS Metabase Explorer console. ( to IMPORT relay list)

Select Metabase tab and select Import Key option.

Select the SMTP Metabase configuration file which was exported from previous system.

Provide the password while importing the data.

Highlight the “Archive Folder” from hierarchy and Expand SMTP virtual server #.

Select the Relay List key , Right Click and Copy it.

Highlight Local Server Name from Hierarchy and Expand it. Select SMTP virtual server where you want to import relay IP list.

Right Click and Select Paste.

We will get a warning message stating that whether you wanted to replace the value, Select Yes.

Close the Metabase Explorer console.

Go back and verify the updated entries on Imported IIS SMTP VS server

Srinivas Santhanam,

Senior Support Engineer, Exchange Server Team

Reviewed by

Kovaiselvan Jayaraman,

Support Escalation Engineer, Exchange Server team