For those who have more then one exchange server, i.e. Edge - Hub/Mailbox, you can use this script to monitor exchange services and if any of the services crashes and doesn't come up this can help monitor and send notification via emails. Next week I will blog about a similar script that allows for remote monitoring of these services using Powershell and WMI.

So the process involves creating the script below, and then schedule it to run every hour using the Windows Scheduler. Once this is set, the service will run locally on the machine, query itself to see if any of ...<< MORE >>

If you have a number of users in an OU that are not mail-enabled. You can use the following command to look for all users in a specific OU and then make them mail-enabled:

Get-User -OrganizationalUnit "pnlab.com/pnlab/users/needmailenabled" | Enable-Mailbox -Database "PNLAB storage group\mailbox database"

Explaination:
Get-User -OrganizationalUnit "pnlab.com/pnlab/users/needmailenabled" | lists all users in the pnlab.com domain, pnlab/users/needmailenabled OU and then pipe the results (line by line) into the next command

Enable-Mailbox -Database "PNLAB storage group\mailbox database" This command takes the output of the last command (Get-User) and mail-enable the AD account puting them into the "PNLAB storage group" storage group and "mailbox database" database. ...<< MORE >>

This is probably an old topic but I'll blog it anyways in case someone might find it useful.

This article is about how to create a list of new users in a specific OU. So here are the requirements:

Users are required to change password at first log on
User accounts are enabled
Username would be the first initial + lastname
There will be a same default password assigned to all of the users

Steps:

Create a batch file with the following content

@echo off
cls
echo Creating Accounts
echo ------------------
for /f "tokens=1-3" %%A in (userlist.txt) do (dsadd user "CN=%%A,ou=Support,ou=IT,dc=thenguyen,dc=local" -fn %%B -ln %%C -display "%%B %%C" -upn %%A@thenguyen.local -pwd ...<< MORE >>

Installing Exchange SP1 Pre-reqs on Windows 2008
Prereqs:
 
.NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0
Powershell
MMC 3.0 (Installed by default)
IIS 7.0 with various components
Unlike IIS 6 in Windows 2003, the version that comes with Windows 2008 are broken down into many different components that must be installed/selected individually during the installation process. You can install this through the Server Manager MMC using Roles or use a command line as described here.
 

NOTE: All server roles other than the Edge Transport server role must first join to the appropriate internal Active Directory forest and domain

Steps:

At the command prompt type:

ServerManagerCmd ...<< MORE >>

So we have SCOM scours through our Domain Controllers in event logs in Agentless mode to look for security event IDs such as account lockout, deletion, creation, etc. Recently, we ran into an issue where SCOM was throwing caution alerts in the monitor view of SCOM with the following description:

Parameter replacement during creation of the alert failed.

Alert: 73A482E1-631D-C63A-1D17-D563646BBD9B

Workflow: MomUIGeneratedRule800972be4c264006b51ebab11dface54

Instance: domaincontroller.domain.com

Instance ID: {7A857146-7E01-F125-C938-21D9B1F75114}

Management Group: MGMTGroup1

Failing replacement: $Data/Params/Param[8]$

After some poking around I decided that the only thing worth looking at is the Alert ID and the Workflow ID. After a googling for a bit ...<< MORE >>

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System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 Root Management Server Unavailable The root management server (Healthservice) has stopped heartbeating This adversely affects all availability calculation for the entire management group<< MORE >>

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Asterisk hot failover solution. No special equipments, no software to purchase. A complete open source solution for Hardware Failure scenario.<< MORE >>