Service 'MSExchangeTransport' failed to reach status 'Running' on this server.

Issue:

While you install Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or Exchange Server 2010 Beta on Windows 2008, you might get error while installing the Hub Transport role:

Hub Transport Role Failed
Error:The execution of: "$error.Clear(); if ($RoleStartTransportService) { start-SetupService -ServiceName MSExchangeTransport }", generated the following error: "Service 'MSExchangeTransport' failed to reach status 'Running' on this server.".
Service 'MSExchangeTransport' failed to reach status 'Running' on this server.

or

Hub Transport Role Failed
Error:The execution of: "$error.Clear(); install-ExsetdataAtom -AtomName SMTP -DomainController $RoleDomainController", generated the following error: "An error occurred with error code '2147504141' and message 'The property cannot be found in the cache.'.".
An error occurred with error code '2147504141' and message 'The property cannot be found in the cache.'.

Resolution:

Aparently, this normally happens when you disable IPv6 in Local Area Connection.
This is due to the behavior of IPv6 in Windows Server 2008, when you disable IPv6 in Local Area Connection on Windows 2008 server.

Either enable IPv6. Or else, if you wish to disable IPv6, you have to make note that IPv6 is not disabled on tunnel interfaces if you disable IPv6 in Local Area Connection. By default, IPv6 is enabled in Windows Server 2008. If you want to disable IPv6 for any reasons, you have to use Registry Editor to completely disable IPv6.
To completely disable IPv6 on a Windows Server 2008-based computer yourself, follow these steps:
Open Registry Editor.
Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6\Parameters
In the details pane, click New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
Type DisabledComponents, and then press ENTER.
Double-click DisabledComponents, and then type ffffffff in Hexadecimal or 4294967295 in Decimal.

Note: If the setup still fails, remove IPv6 entry from the hosts file available at %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc

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How to setup and use a SQL Server alias - Can't connect DB via named instance?

How to setup and use a SQL Server alias

Issue:
I have an application that has a specified database connection that I either can't or don't want to change. However, I need to move the database to a new server. How can I do this easily without breaking other things that maybe using this connection and/or database?
Resolution:By using an alias, we can keep the application configuration the same, but tell the operating system to look somewhere else for the database. One proviso is that once an alias is created, it is set at the operating system level. That means if we have two applications which connect to MySQLServer on that computer, once the alias is created, both will be re-pointed based on the alias. You can create an alias using one of two utilities:
1. SQL Server Configuration Manager
2. SQL Server Client Network Utility

Events:

Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: MSSQL$EV
Event Category: (4)
Event ID: 17806
Date: 1/30/2009
Time: 7:47:19 PM
User: N/A
Computer: LAB9CUST4
Description:
SSPI handshake failed with error code 0x8009030c while establishing a connection with integrated security; the connection has been closed. [CLIENT: 172.22.3.56]
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.Data:0000: 8e 45 00 00 14 00 00 00 ŽE......0008: 0d 00 00 00 4c 00 41 00 ....L.A.0010: 42 00 39 00 43 00 55 00 B.9.C.U.0018: 53 00 54 00 34 00 5c 00 S.T.4.\.0020: 45 00 56 00 00 00 00 00 E.V.....0028: 00 00 ..

Event Type: Failure Audit
Event Source: MSSQL$EV
Event Category: (4)
Event ID: 18452
Date: 1/30/2009
Time: 7:47:19 PM
User: N/A
Computer: LAB9CUST4
Description:
Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection. [CLIENT: 172.22.3.56]
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.Data:0000: 14 48 00 00 0e 00 00 00 .H......0008: 0d 00 00 00 4c 00 41 00 ....L.A.0010: 42 00 39 00 43 00 55 00 B.9.C.U.0018: 53 00 54 00 34 00 5c 00 S.T.4.\.0020: 45 00 56 00 00 00 07 00 E.V.....0028: 00 00 6d 00 61 00 73 00 ..m.a.s.0030: 74 00 65 00 72 00 00 00 t.e.r...

See below for reference:

http://sqlforums.windowsitpro.com/web/forum/messageview.aspx?catid=60&threadid=84680&highlight_key=y&keyword1=sspi

http://blogs.msdn.com/sql_protocols/archive/2008/05/03/understanding-the-error-message-login-failed-for-user-the-user-is-not-associated-with-a-trusted-sql-server-connection.aspx

More info while connecting with named instance:

TITLE: Connect to Server ------------------------------ Cannot connect to EVDB.------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18452)
For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&EvtSrc=MSSQLServer&EvtID=18452&LinkId=20476
------------------------------ BUTTONS:
OK ------------------------------no error in evnt log

Resolution:

See http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1620

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Exchange Server 2007 Hub Transport and Client Access Server on the Same NLB Cluster

In order to keep the number of servers down in a high availability environment, administrators have been looking at using Network Load Balancing (NLB) for CAS and then co-locating the HT role on each node of the NLB cluster to also provide high availability for the HT role.

This configuration can work, and it really is not too difficult to configure. It is extremely important to note that using NLB to load balance the default SMTP receive connectors (using port 25) is not supported and is completely unnecessary since they are load balanced for all intra-Exchange communications like HT to HT communications. However, using NLB to provide redundancy and load balancing for connections to HTs that are hosting Client SMTP receive connectors (using port 587) is fully supported and may be desireable if you have a large number of external SMTP/POP and SMTP/IMAP clients that need to connect to this receive connector.

The steps that you need are to:

1. Setup two servers running Windows Server 2003 with two NICs in each server
2. Install Exchange Server2007 Hub Transport and Client Access Service (CAS) on each server
3. Configure one NIC for the Network Load Balance cluster and setup the other NIC in a separate network so it can be managed through that IP address
4. Configure NLB with Unicast and even load balancing
5. Setup the port rules:
• Port 25 to 25 for both TCP and UDP and select the radio button to disable this port range (this will exclude port 25 from being listed to using the virtual IP address of the NLB cluster, but still allow the individual server IPs to still listen to port 25)
• Port 465 to 465 for both TCP and UDP and selected the radio button to disable this port range
• Port 80 to 80 for both TCP and UDP and set affinity to none (I recommend "none" so you can easily test and verify that it works)
• Port 587 to 587 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none (this is for the client SMTP receive connector)
• Port 443 to 443 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
• Port 110 to 110 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
• Port 993 to 993 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
• Port 143 to 143 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
• Port 995 to 995 for both TCP and UDP, affinity none
6. With affinity set to none, you can more readily test the CAS (after updating the web pages to show which server is actually responding) and verify that the load is being shared. You can also test to make sure the NLB cluster does not respond to SMTP on port 25, which it shouldn't if you set it right, and verify that each server does respond to SMTP as an individual server name.
7. You can configure protocol logging for the other protocols and telnet to the ports using the NLB IP address to see if they are loading balancing like they should. You can also use the NLB IP for the testing by sending and receiving messages and checking the message tracking logs to see that the traffic was being balanced. It all worked.

NOTE: You may want to change affinity to either single (especially if it is being used internally) or Class C (especially if it is accessible from the Internet) once your testing is done.

Good luck, and have lots of fun!

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Hindu or Muslim - The logic of terror

It always makes my heart swell with pride when we are called a big Muslim population nation-a fact that many of us sometimes seem to forget. We are the third biggest Muslim nation in the world, far ahead of Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan or Malaysia or Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia.

But it is also a fact that scares many. They are the ones who project the infirmities of a few Muslims on to a whole community. A population that is inherently Indian. That is what makes India India, and that is what made India.

Talk about terrorism and the modus operandi is simple. The ones who have the larger picture in mind, the ones who are devious and could have any one amongst several objectives in mind: weaken India's economy, slow down India's rise to big power status, get India's democracy to falter, make its people fight one another, direct its realignment to certain powers.

Terrorists do not believe in the ideology of religions: they believe in selfish motives, professional or political. And they tap into age-old latent fears.

Those who act out terror - call them the instruments - happen to be shown the small picture. And that picture fits religion into a hallucinatory jigsaw solved for them. They are people with wants, desires, anger, sadness, strengths and weaknesses. Like you and like me. And the handlers tackle each one of these sentiments to their advantage.

Make them desire the greatness of certain elements of their faith, make them want to be famous, notorious, well known. Make them angry against the other as there is always a sample of crime against a community that can be magnified to make it appear universal, make them sad at instances of loss that their community has suffered, tap the strength of their youth and their skills, and make up for their weaknesses by giving them power - weapons, money, training, confidence and a group to belong to. And then show them a direction. Now repeat this heady mix over and over again. Till it becomes a way of life for them. And then make them live the life. Make them doers. And they do - over and over again. And they have done it again. In Mumbai.

They are to blame. For sure. For they did not have the rationale to be wiser, to see through the haze that was created around them. Punish them hard. But don't stop at that. That is where we as a nation have faltered, time and again. Not tracking back far enough to where it all begins. To the power centres whose operatives live in opulence, plan big and smart.

They are the ones who breed terror. And they put a whole gulf of buffer between themselves and the terror instruments in widening arcs that are highly sophisticated, educated, suave, selfish and dishonest close to the power centres themselves and gradually lose sophistication and increase in extremism and base feelings towards the periphery. The terrorists that we see are at the periphery. The real terrorists are far removed and will always remain powerful and smug till we figure out how to get at them. Get to them.

The logic of terror in India is simple. Carry out a terror strike with suitably prepared Muslim terrorists. The names will jump out sooner or later. The government will be called weak. Opposition political groups will demand stronger laws. Those laws will lead to arrests, roundups, detentions and torture by an untrained section of the law enforcers. Again mostly of Muslims. This will again prove the original premise that the state, that India, is against the Muslims. A few disgruntled youth will again be ready to be recruited to carry forward the agenda of teaching the state , India - a lesson. Once again there will be reprisals and the cycle shall repeat itself. Over and over, till India begins to erode, wear out, die.

There will be instances when the bigger innocent population will be caught up in the crossfire. And when they shall try to make sense of it, try and come to terms with their loss and grief, the recruiters will be ready with their brand of explanations. And the recruiters will recruit to all sorts of groups. Muslim fundamentalist, Hindu fundamentalist and mushrooming new entities. The power centres will drive the Mercs and live in the world's finest, while the instruments will put on the backpacks and wear Versace emblazoned T Shirts and gun down innocents.

While terror in Mumbai was underway 'The Economist' commented: Its assailants, still holed up in the city, would like nothing better than to provoke a backlash against Muslim inhabitants-which in turn would help to radicalise India's vast Muslim minority. Long after India's commandos have killed or captured the last of the terrorists that is how they would still hope to win.

Let's break the cycle. Let's get smarter.

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Failover cluster features supported by Exchange 2007 SP1

Failover cluster features supported by Exchange 2007 SP1 are depicted in the table below:

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What is Local Continuous Replication in Exchange 2007

Local Continuous Replication

In previous version Exchange 2000/2003 single server database, let say database suddenly crashed or disk failed to read\write database. So here my database is no more in use due to some disaster and my solution would bring back my database by mode of replacement of disk and then restoring the database by mode of RSG. What will be my server availability and time consumption to restore my database it is comparatively high and SLA will effect and business ofcourse.

But in Exchange 2007 we have concept of LCR where you can mount your database as soon as possible with less time consumption. LCR is nothing but it will keep a copy of the database and log files in another location which is called as “Passive Storage Group” from the Active Storage Group”. For copying the database and log file it uses shipping technology which is nothing replicating the data from source to destination.

Background Process of LCR

Whenever you enable the LCR function, the database are first pass through seeding process, seeding is nothing but a process that creating starting point to copy the database file, then the database is copied to destination folder and then finally logs are shipped into it. Then it will write that information to the database. When you enable the LCR you will find this event id in the application log 2014, 2015 & 2016.

Prior with the release of Exchange 2007 Beta Version we need to do seeding manually for seeding we need manually enter this following command from the powershell

suspend storagegroupcopy -identity "first storage group' (temporarily stop LCR )

update-storagegroupcopy -identity "first storage group" (seeding done here)

resume-storagegroupcopy -identity "first storage group" (resume the LCR)

With the release of Beta2 by default seeding is done at the time of enabling LCR.

Monitoring the LCR

Msexchange replication under this

copygenerationnumber & replay queue length

copygenerationnumber : The number of log file which is currently replicated

Replayqueuelength : the number of log file which is still need to play and waiting in the queue

How you can recover the database through LCR Mode

Let say I have one database called as Mailbox Store stored under First Storage Group.

Open => EMC => Server Configuration => Mailboxes => First Storage Group => Enable LCR and then follow the wizard for selecting the folder.

Now the database is seeded then log files are shipped to target folder.

One fine day let say mailbox database.edb got corrupted.

Run this command Restore-Storagegroupcopy -identity "Third Storage Group" -ReplaceLocations:$true

The above command will check the path of LCR like database, logs and check point file it will redirect the path location in EMC to LCR folder.

Then you can mount the database (mount-database –identity “Third mailbox store”)

Once you mount the database then you need to re-enable the LCR because it will stop the LCR function but before that you need to clean up all the files if you are using any old LCR folder or create a new folder instead

Disadvantages of LCR

Even though it is very good pre-backup solution for database but still there is some disadvantages

1) We can't expect that the all the data can be potentially recovered because the log files will not be in synch as they are shipped.

2) If our active storage group fails then we need to manually switch to passive storage group but it is inexpensive solution.

3) It will be used for the storage group which has only one database per storage group

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A few tips for Exchange Server 2007 SCC & CCR clustered Installations

Have you tried to install Exchange Server 2007 yet? Clustering is different. First of all Exchange Virtual Servers (EVS) are gone, replaced with Clustered Mailbox Server (CMS). You now have two options for clustering, Single Copy Cluster (meaning one CMS per server really) and it is not the default installation. The default is now Continuous Cluster Replication (CCR) which is something new to Exchange Server 2007,

You still install and configure clustering first, then install Exchange. But passive and active nodes are supposed to be handled differently now. And active/active clustering is simply not allowed anymore I would use setup.exe or the GUI to install both nodes as passive. This will put the Exchange bits on machine, but won't create the CMS just yet. From the command prompt you would use something like this syntax:

setup.com /mode:install /roles:mb

Which would should come back with:

Welcome to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unattended Setup Preparing Exchange Setup
Copying Setup Files ......................... COMPLETED

The following server roles will be installed:

Management Tools
Mailbox Role
Performing Microsoft Exchange Server Prerequisite Check
Mailbox Role Checks ......................... COMPLETED
Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server
Copying Exchange files ......................... COMPLETED
Mailbox Server Role ......................... COMPLETED

The Microsoft Exchange Server setup operation completed successfully.
Do this for both nodes. Then on the Active node you will need to run exsetup.exe. Why? Because of this little gem in the books online:

If you already have one or more server roles installed on a computer, you cannot use the Exchange Server 2007 Setup wizard or the Setup.exe command to add or remove server roles. Instead, you must use the ExSetup.exe command.

DOH! Not knowing this means you can try Setup.exe until you are blue in the face and never get Exchange clustered.

So the ExSetup.exe to create the CMS is (replace CMSNAME with a real meanful name, replace cip with a real IP):

exsetup /mode:install /clustered /cn:CMSNAME /cip:198.168.1.100

Which would should come back with:

Welcome to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unattended Setup
No server roles will be installed

Clustered Mailbox Server

Performing Microsoft Exchange Server Prerequisite Check
Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server
Clustered Mailbox Server ......................... COMPLETED
The Microsoft Exchange Server setup operation completed successfully.
This should create all the clustered resource Exchange needs.

Why not install the bits and create all the clustered resources together with the Setup.exe command? The syntax would look like this:

setup.com /mode:install /roles:mb /newcms /cn:CMSNAME /cip:198.168.1.100

If you Active Directory is large it could take a little bit for the CMS to be registered properly, in that case you might get an error this like:

Welcome to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unattended Setup

No server roles will be installed

Clustered Mailbox Server Performing Microsoft Exchange Server Prerequisite Check
Clustered Mailbox Role Checks ......................... COMPLETED
Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server
Clustered Mailbox Server ......................... FAILED

The computer account 'CMSNAME' was created on the domain controller '\\dc02.clusterhelp.ad', but has not replicated to the desired domain controller (dc01.clusterhelp.ad) after waiting approxmately 60 seconds. Please wait for the account to replicate and re-run exsetup /newcms.
The Exchange Server setup operation did not complete. Visit http://support.microsoft.com and enter the Error ID to find more information.
So, you only get 60 seconds for AD to fully replicate - DOH! Interesting. See AD was using our DNS (dc02) on the Public, but the Exchange was on the private near dc01. The spelling error is Microsoft's by the way, not mine. You can add /dc:dc02.clusterhelp.ad but setup will fail if the DNS is not on the same AD site as the Exchange server. You will see this error:

Setup cannot use domain controller 'dc02.clusterhelp.ad' because it belongs to Active Directory site 'Public'. Setup must use a domain controller in the same site as this computer (Private).

Other DNS messages you might get:

Exchange setup cannot continue because DNS information for the clustered mailbox server "CMSNAME" has not finished replicating. Please run setup again after replication has completed. After replication has completed, the command "nslookup CMSNAME" should succeed.

This one again means you need to let it bake some more, let DNS replicate. Check your event logs. In some environments, you might have to wait 30 to 45 minutes for things to settle down. Just rerun the exsetup command again.

Lastly you might get this error:

Error:
Error of unknown type occured while performing exsetdata operation; the original error code was 0xc103fd2c

This means might have a duplicate DNS record that needs to be removed before CMSNAME be created. Check your event logs for the exact error and believe them! The spelling error is again Microsoft's not mine. If Exchange can't create the record look for duplicates.

If after all that you just want to give up, the command would look like this:

exsetup /mode:uninstall /removecms /cmsname:CMSNAME

So why am I only showing you the command line for ExSetup.exe? Because you can only run the GUI seutp once, after that you have to use ExSetup.exe.

Good luck, check your event logs and hopefully this will help someone else out.

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