sfogg
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Joined: 14.Sep.2011
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Our IT Support company has signed on a new client account with an SBS'08 server with Exchange 2007.
There is no way to sugar-coat this: we have inherited an ungodly mess. Simply put, very little on this network appears to work properly. The AD is behaving strangely, with the DC refusing a solid handful of the LDAP and RPC requests, and the Exchange server appears to be so badly misconfigured that it's nearly unusable. There is a RODC-BDC on the network, which appears to be actually doing very little.
Because we bill be the hour, I need to look VERY carefully at how long it will take me to pick apart the thousands of errors, vs. how long it will take to scrap the server, rebuild the directory, and start them off with a properly configured and stable network.
The office consists of 7 local users, and 3-4 remote users. The exchange server has approximately 20 mailboxes hosted, with about 9gb total storage used up. Their backups don't appear to have included the exchange databases (super-huge "D'oh!"), and the problems have been around for over a year.
Running the Best Practices tools for AD and Exchange show pages and pages of problems, ranging from missing data stores, to unresponsive DCs, bad RPC calls, LDAP errors, bad config lines... You name it.
My experience with exchange so far has been predominantly administration, with a handful of deployments. All my disaster recovery on other clients has been made easy by Backup Exec and the like. In terms of nuts-and-bolts rebuilds, and manipulating the data stores directly, I'm a complete novice.
However, I'm a fast reader and a quick learner!
What I'd like to respectfully ask the forum is where should I start in terms of my thinking here? I have already spent about 6 hours attempting to chase down and solve the items listed variously in Event Viewer and the Best Practices tools. I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole; I fix one error, and another pops up. I came into this late in the game, so I honestly have NO idea what's been done so far, or what was done that has caused these problems. Frankly, I'm at the "throw my hands up" point with that server. We've got no known good config to go back to, and I'm not convinced that enough of the services are working properly to even be fixable--at least within a reasonable [billable] timeframe.
I know that I could rebuild that AD from the ground up in a few hours, including formatting, reinstalling, and recreating the user list. I know that I could set up the exchange server fairly rapidly with a complete (but empty) set of mailboxes. Rejoining all the machines to the domain would take no more than an hour or two.
Where to proceed from there is a bit on the blurry side:
I do NOT what to do a direct migration; that was done once with this server, and done incorrectly. The exchange config is littered with broken references to data stores that are located on the old Exchange 2003 server--which no longer exists.
In my twisted little mind, I feel like what I should do is create the Exchange server from scratch, map the mailboxes out from scratch, and manually import the messages ONLY to each mailbox--thereby avoiding (as much as possible) reading ANY of the "original" configuration. I'm not actually sure how to do this.
So, before I go and do something irreversible, I'm looking for some input!
_____________________________
"I choose my acquaintances for their good looks, my friends for their good character, and my enemies for their intelligence. One can NEVER be too careful about one's choice of enemy." - Oscar Wilde
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Migrate Exchange 2007 to 2007 - 
RE: Migrate Exchange 2007 to 2007 - 
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