Windows Server Backup with DAG

Following on from the Exchange 2010 issues I’ve been having, my last hurdle has been backups. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why the daily backups of my Exchange installations were failing. So I followed a couple of YouTube videos and made minor changes. This still didn’t work, so after a day of not thinking about it, and clearing my mind I finally found this solution, which worked a treat:

Using Windows Server Backup on Database Availability Group Members

If a server hosting the data being backed up is a member of a database availability group (DAG) and hosts both active and passive database copies, you must disable the Microsoft Exchange Replication service VSS writer. If the Microsoft Exchange Replication service VSS writer is enabled, the backup operation will fail.

To disable the Microsoft Exchange Replication service VSS writer, perform the following steps:

Log on to the server by using an account that has local administrator access, and then start Registry Editor (regedit).
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\Replay\Parameters.
Add a new DWORD value named EnableVSSWriter, and set its value to 0.
Exit Registry Editor and then restart the Microsoft Exchange Replication service.

This solution is found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd876851.aspx

Web Development Projects

In my spare time (limited though it is!) I have been working on a website for a local church (where my better half happens to work) and am quite impressed with the start that’s been made…

 

So how about visiting http://www.holytrinitybelbroughton.co.uk – and if you have any ideas or suggestions fill in the form on the Contact page.

I have also redone my homepage at: http://www.johnnyward.me.uk and modified some settings on my main blog to fix the URL rewrites (http://www.johnnyward.co.uk). not bad for a new year so far…

Server Problems

For some reason a fairly important server won’t install Windows 2008 SP2 or any other updates, I’ve followed the errors in the event log and come across this excellent how-to to fix the issue: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/408

Exchange 2010 Failure

Bugger!

It seems that after I’ve finally built a redundant Exchange 2010 cluster with DAG that I needed a reboot on one of the servers (due to some other reconfiguration) – unfortunately I had forgotten the server hadn’t been rebooted since before AVG Business Edition was installed, oops, this appears to interfere with the WinRM service which just wouldn’t work, this meant I couldn’t use anything powered by powershell through the IIS – in other words I had no Exchange Management Console (EMC) or shell commands. The problem wasn’t so much emails as the DAG implementation ensured my other server took care of that with the passive database copy becoming active at the server fail, it was my primary public folder database which had the most problems, it just wouldn’t mount, so a quick scheduled reboot (during the lunch hour) and within 20 minutes (after 2 1/2 hours diagnosis and testing) I had the public folders back, this was also partially affected by the Replication service on the healthy server being stuck in a “stopping” state, I had to kill the process in task manager to fix this and manually start it.

So, what have I learnt today?
Exchange works, now leave it alone!

P.S

somewhere along the line this reboot etc enabled SSL on the pop3 service, this affected a few of our remote users, but I managed to fix that quickly enough once I knew the issue!