I’m seeing an interesting, and seemingly recurring issue with one particular user’s Exchange calendar.  The complain is always that when a new appointment is added to the calendar, it disappears a minute or two later.  The event log on the Exchange Server always shows these errors:

Calendaring agent failed with error code 0×80040215 while saving appointment.

Calendaring agent failed to update the free/busy cache during an appointment save or delete operation.

Calendaring agent failed in message save notification with error 0×800703eb on XXXX@jfbc.org: /Calendar/test.EML.

I’ve tested, researched, tried to reproduce, etc, etc and am at a loss as to what’s causing this.  The only thing I can think of is maybe it’s related to syncing the users Palm Pilot.  Maybe the Palm device is allowing something to be input that Exchange doesn’t like?

I have figured out that there is some corrupt record that exists in the mailbox that’s causing this.  Moving the mailbox to another database and then back clears things up for a while, then it pops back up.  I’m curious if anyone else out there has seen anything like this?

We worked for a while yesterday to get Bob’s Windows Mobile phone to sync with Exchange (Bob just joined our IT team - welcome Bob!). Without much luck.  Bob is our first user with Windows Mobile.  Everyone else uses Blackberry devices.

We use an ISA 2006 server in the DMZ with RADIUS authentication as a front-end server to Exchange.  I initially added the Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync virtual directory to the list of paths in the existing ISA rule.  We got errors about not having the correct privileges to do ActiveSync, which we obviously did have.  After messing with this for a little while, I realized I needed to create a separate rule for the ActiveSync path and place it above my OWA redirect rule.  I have a rule that allows the user to type in just http://webmail.jfbc.org and get automatically redirected to https://webmail.jfbc.org/owa.  It seems that this rule was also redirecting the ActiveSync directory.  Here’s what the “Correct” setup looks like in ISA server:

Apparently, that wasn’t the only issue.  Next problem: It kept complaining about an incorrect username or password.  Obviously, the username and password were correct.  Some monitoring in ISA server revealed the authentication didn’t seem to be happening.  All of the requests were marked as “anonymous.”

You won’t believe how simple this was.   On the handheld, there are 3 boxes: username, password, and domain.  We run split DNS, with JFBC.ORG as the internal domain name, so that’s what we entered.  Turns out that ISA server wants the NETBIOS name instead, which is simply JFBC.  It’s amazing how something so simple can create such a big issue.

I love being on the bleeding-edge of technology.  In our “wired” world, technology is critical in empowering our staff to more effectively carry out the mission of the church.  We were a relatively early adopter of Exchange 2007 - migrating from Lotus Notes last summer.  Now, we are actively exploring the cool features Windows Server 2008 has to offer as well as beginning to roll it out in our production environment.

Things have gone relatively smooth so far, with a WSUS server, three terminal servers, and a few other miscellaneous apps successfully running on Server 2008.  I’ve recently been looking into migrating our exchange environment to Server 2008.  Since they are both Microsoft Products, it should be easy, right?  NOT!  I wonder sometimes if MS makes it hard for us on purpose.  Here are a few of the stipulations for running Exchange 2007 on Server 2008 (from the Exchange Team Blog:

• RTM version of Exchange 2007 will not install run on Server 2008 (I can understand this, since Exchange 2007 was released way before Server 2008)
• Exchange 2007 SP1 runs on Server 2008 (sounds good so far)
• Upgrading to Exchange 2007 SP1 on Server 2003, then upgrading to Server 2008 is a No-Go
• Upgrading from Server 2003 to Server 2008, then installing Exchange 2007 SP1 = absolutely not
• Clean install of Server 2008 + clean install of Exchange 2007 SP1 is gold.

So, basically, the only way to get exchange onto Server 2008 is to do a clean install of Server 2008 on bare metal, then install Exchange 2007 SP1.  At that point, you must configure all appropriate Exchange roles on the new server, migrate all the mailboxes, and then decommission the old server.  Doesn’t sound like much fun.  And, to think, I have 3 Exchange servers.

Obviously, I’ll survive and it will all get done, but it’s a bit frustrating that a company like Microsoft can’t plan for better integration/interoperability among their own products!

It’s amazing how bad it’s gotten lately. We average over 20,000 emails per day and less than 1500 are legitimate messages. Check out this spike this afternoon. I wish I could bill the spammers for their wasted bandwidth.

I spent some time on way home today (when I wasn’t driving) to clean up my inbox.  I love cached Exchange mode in Outlook - the ability to delete, move, and reply to stuff and have it all sync up next time you hit the network is great.  Anyway, I still need to do a little bit more work, but I’m down to 160 items in my inbox.  I don’t recall it being that small in a LONG time.  Just thought I’d share

The alert emails as well as emailing activation passwords to users has never quite worked right on our BES server. I’d see something like this in the event log every time BES tried to send an email: DoSMTPCommand: Command was: MAIL FROM: <BESAdmin> followed by DoSMTPCommand: Response was: 501 5.1.7 Invalid address. Notice the from address? There’s no domain listed. Weird. I know I entered the correct fully qualified address.

I’ve Googled, searched the docs, read forums, and everything in between and never could find the issue. I don’t have a need to email passwords to users and the alerts weren’t real important, so fixing it has been on the back burner. Fast forward to today - I came across a forum post suggesting to add a new DWORD value - MxDisabled=1 in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Enterprise Server\BESAlert.

I tried it and low and behold it fixed the SMTP issues. I can’t imagine what disabling MX lookups would have to do with the FROM address being improperly formatted. I wonder if it’s a bug in BES? Anyone else seen this issue?