Restart the domain controller in Directory Services Restore Mode Remotely

Extremely useful article when you need to boot domain controller into Directory Services Restore Mode Remotely:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779687(WS.10).aspx

Assign permissions to the tree of OUs when inheritance turned off (through Powershell)

Recently I needed to add permission to move computer objects to OUs for the group of users. I added the permissions to the “root” OU and tested it: everything worked great.
After I reported that task is done, I heard from the users in that group that they still get ‘Access is denied’ trying to move computer objects. I discovered that in AD permissions inheritance was disabled for most of the sub-OUs. So, there are more than 1,000 OUs to add permissions to.
Following script took care of the task for me:
#Require Quest "Active Roles Management Shell for Active Directory".

#Put following to the text document saved as *.ps1:

add-PSSnapin quest.activeroles.admanagement
$OU = “root OU DN”
get-qadobject -searchRoot $OU -searchScope 'SubTree'-Type organizationalUnit -SizeLimit 0 |
Add-QADPermission -Account “domainname\user group to add permissions” -Rights CreateChild -ApplyTo All -ChildType
Computer

Email Router for CRM4 and multi-server environment

We discovered interesting issue with email router when there are few (more than one) CRM4 Servers connected to the same database.

All CRM components in multi-server environment work independently: all requests are being fulfilled by the particular server to which server user connects.

Except e-mails (and mail merge).

Email Router happens to work only on the first CRM server in the environment.

Let me explain a little further:

Let's say you have 3 CRM servers: server1, server2, server3 connecting to the same database. They are combined to the server farm by the load balancer. "Virtual" name of the farm is crm.yourcompany.com. Users access CRM using "virtual" name: http://crm.yourcompany.com.

User requests are answered by one of 3 servers (server1 or server2 or server3) – directed by load balancer.

Let's say, user connects to server3, opens Contact and selects 'Send E-mail'. User fills email fields and click 'Send'. You would expect that email router on server3 processes that email. You would be wrong – email gets processed by email router on server1.

(I wonder what will happen if server1 goes down – would it mean that there will be no email processing by email router? – to me it looks like a single point of failure – hello, Microsoft…)

Email issues in CRM4 (various) – tips of fixing.

 

Symptoms:

Can't start Microsoft CRM Email Router Service

Emails are not sent stuck in 'Pending Send' – both regular and Mail Merge.

Cause:

Following file got corrupted:

Microsoft.Crm.Tools.EmailAgent.SystemState.xml

Fix:

2 options:

Either replace that file with the file from "working" CRM server (if you deployed multiple CRM Servers connected to the same database),

Or delete that file – restart should re-create the file

 

After the fix: re-start the 'Microsoft CRM Email Router Service'

Web site of the sister-company went live!

www.tacklesoftware.com went live. Home of the brand new Recycle Bin for Microsoft Dynamics CRM4. Product adds easy recovery to CRM4. Other CRM Tools to come. Good luck to the new web site!

File system Anti-virus exceptions for Exchange 2007

Great article that list how to find out the definite list of files and folders to be excluded from file system anti-virus scanning

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/security-message-hygiene/configuring-file-level-antivirus-software.html

Symantec Enterprise Vault (aka KVS) and showInAddressBook attribute

showInAddressBook attribute of system or journaling account might get messed up (ie. the value is set to <Not Set>), which would result Journaling Task to fail on starting up with the following error message (among other bad things caused by showInAddressBook not set):

Event Type:    Error

Event Source:    Enterprise Vault

Event Category:    Journal Task

Event ID:    3305

Date:        6/14/2010

Time:        12:36:06 PM

User:        N/A

Computer:    KVSServer

Description:

The Task 'Exchange Journaling Task for ExchServer' failed to log on to Exchange server 'ExchServer' using mailbox 'SMTP:journalmailbox@mydomain.com'. Please ensure the mailbox has not been hidden, that the server is running and that the Vault account has sufficient permissions on the server.

 

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://evevent.symantec.com/rosetta/showevent.asp

To fix – simply set showInAddressBook attribute properly.

Powershell Tips

Tip #1: when you have Exchange Powershell installed on the workstation, you might need to load Exchange shell every time you want to run Exchange based command anyways:

add-pssnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin

Tip #2: To get mailbox stats run: get-mailboxstatistics –server mailbox1w | Where-Object {$_.displayname –eq "John Smith"}

Great command to see ‘Services’ in details and ‘StartUps’

Msconfig:

(I knew similar tool was available from Sysinternals, but did not know it's now incorporated into Windows (including XP)