Author: Adam Fowler

Recovery Storage Groups in Exchange 2007

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

Over the Christmas break, I had the pleasure of dealing with email loss on Exchange 2007. A database had gone offline, and in the process of it being re-seeded to the other mailbox server in the CCR (Continuous Cluster Replication), it didn’t really reseed correctly and 4 days of email was lost.

What most people do (including me) in this scenario is restore the database, swap the databases around and replay the logs. This wasn’t possible in my scenario due to limited disk space. I started reading up on Recovery Storage Groups which have been around since the Exchange 2003 days. You can mount a restored database, then replay the contents into live mailboxes and merge the contents together. This sounded perfect for my issue, because I could just merge the missing days with no downtime.

First, you need to create a Recovery Storage Group. I followed the first two steps from here: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH51555 which is just these two Powershell commands:

new-storagegroup -Server <Sever_Name> -LogFolderPath <path_to_Logfiles> -Name <RSG_Name> -SystemFolderPath  <Database_Path> -Recovery

new-mailboxdatabase -mailboxdatabasetorecover <Database_Name> -storagegroup <Server_Name>\<RSG_Name> -EDBFilePath <Database_Path>

The first command is creating the storage group, while the second one is creating a new blank database. You can swap over your restored database with the one you created, as long as the database is offline.

You can either use more Powershell commands to do your merging, or use the Exchange Management Console. There’s a great article here on how to do this: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Working-Recovery-Storage-Groups-Exchange-2007.html

Because you’ve already created a Recovery Storage Group, you just need to use the ‘Merge or Copy Mailbox Contents’ option from ‘Database Recovery Management’ option in the ‘Exchange Management Console – Toolbox’ area. It’s a fairly straight forward wizard, you can choose emails with a particular subject, or in my case just a certain time period. You can also choose whatever mailboxes you’d like to merge, which is great for testing and proving it will work. There’s a brief article here for more details: http://www.petri.co.il/restoring_exchange_mailbox_recovery_storage_group_part2.htm

It’s worth considering using Recovery Storage Groups in a disaster situation, even if it’s just for one mailbox or a few emails. There’s no outage involved which makes it a much nicer method than having to bring your whole database offline.

Shriking your SQL log file

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I ran into this issue today on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 server. A new server I’d built hadn’t had the SQL backups set yet, so the SQL log file had blown out in size (100gb in less than a month). It had used up all the disk space allocated, so doing a normal backup wasn’t shrinking the log file. The solution was to run the following query. To do this, in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, select the culprit database and then the ‘New Query’ button. This will bring up an area to type your query:

ALTER DATABASE dbname SET RECOVERY SIMPLE

DBCC SHRINKFILE(‘dbname_log’, 0, TRUNCATEONLY)

 Replace ‘dbname’ with your database name, and click ‘! Execute’ to run. It should look like this:

reportserver

Once successfully run, your log file size should be much more reasonable.

To stop this occurring in the first place, make sure you’ve set up regular backups to your databases. Just running a backup won’t truncate the logs though, and here’s a great article on Technet explaining it:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/beatrice/archive/2008/07/24/full-backups-transaction-logs-backup.aspx

 

Good luck!

Blogger vs WordPress

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you’re reading it on my revamped site. The old site was http://adamfowlerit.blogspot.com – hosted by Google’s Blogger application. I’ve now moved to a hosted service on Bluehost with WordPress, and my own domain http://adamfowlerit.com.

Part of the reason for doing this was that on Blogger, I couldn’t do something I consider basic – add a twitter feed panel on the side. They used to have an addon that did this, but it has been broken for a long time. To it’s credit, Blogger is incredibly easy to set up – if you’re looking at just starting out and getting some content up, it’s a great platform for the basics and served me well. Once you want to start playing around a bit more, you’ll find Blogger limiting.

With my jump to WordPress, I was rather spoilt from the ease of use on the Blogger side. Not to say that WordPress is difficult, but it does take a lot more time and effort in comparison. There’s a lot more support for WordPress out there, with so many sites using it now. You can customise so much, and there’s different levels of customisation. A lot of the basics are quite easy to do with the web based GUI (in which I’m typing this post now), but if you want you can break out the CSS code and change anything.

There’s a huge amount of themes you can choose from as a starting platform, as well as plugins to add extra functionality (such as a twitter feed!). Someone’s even written an importer so it’ll grab all the content from your Blogger page (including comments) and put it into WordPress.

I’m still learning with it, so please feed back any suggestions.

So, for a lot of people, Blogger will do the basic job, and do it really easily. For advanced stuff, WordPress is the go. It’s ‘free’, but you’ll need to host it somewhere. I’m paying a few dollars a month for it to be hosted at Bluehost with a bunch of other features included.

Details available here:
BlueHost or if you want to give me a referral,copy and paste this: http://www.bluehost.com/track/adamfowl

Windows 8 – Easy Admin Access

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
One of the difficulties I’ve had with using Windows 8 is getting access to stuff. Stuff I’m used to accessing easily, like being able to edit a text file under C:\Program Files\. In Windows 8, on a non-domain connected PC and using a Windows Account, you can’t do this. Even if you’re an Administrator, and you’ve turned off User Access Control (UAC):

This gets frustrating very quickly. I was really baffled by this behaviour – why am I, as a local administrator on Windows 8 using a Windows Account, getting ‘Access Denied’ when trying to edit a text file under a Program Files folder??

I posted onto the Microsoft Technet forums here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/af7cfb87-769f-4789-b6ac-1894cc9ea581/ where I was advised that this was by design. The upside, was that I was told about a handy little feature on how to run anything as administrator easily. ‘Create New Task’ has a great little tickbox that says ‘Create this task with administrative privilidges’. I’m not sure why this is called ‘Create New Task’ as it looks exactly the same as the ‘Run’ window, even with the same text. To get this, open Task Manager and go to File > Create New Task.

You can run anything here just as you would from the ‘Run’ window, including ‘explorer’ which will bring up Windows Explorer, but with PROPER full Administrator access, finally allowing me to edit that text file I was going on about earlier.

Hopefully once you know this, you’ll also be less frustrated like me!

Quick Review – Convertpdftoword.org

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I was sent an email asking to review this by someone at CometDocs, and it’s free, so I figured why not. It’s called Convertpdftoword.org which is also the website it’s hosted at, by no amazing coincidence. What is it? An online PDF to Word converter. Owned by Cometdocs.com who do a lot of different online file conversions.

PDF to Word? I know I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing, but historically the answer is either getting expensive software to convert, or ask the originator for a non-PDF version of the document.

This is cloud based, which always rings alarm bells for me. Do you want to send your documents to an unknown 3rd party, just because they’re offering a free service? That’s what you’ll need to decide, but this company resides in Canada and the servers for holding your files are located in the United States which matters to some people (the more security minded just won’t use this service).

So, how does it work? You just go to http://www.convertpdftoword.org/ , browse and upload your PDF, put in your email address and wait for the resulting Word document to arrive.

A few minutes later, and I’ve got emails for the two test PDFs I uploaded. They take you back to the site to download them, where they’re hosted for 24 hours. I don’t believe there’s any security behind this, apart from a unique URL – so again, you’d only do this with data you don’t care about others having.

Once you get back to their webpage to download, it sits ‘Processing’ for a few seconds and then starts downloading. It might be buggy with Internet Explorer 10, as it didn’t stop the ‘Processing’ dialogue even after the file had downloaded. This happened on both files.

The results were very impressive. They looked identical to the PDFs I had uploaded, with coloured pictures and all in the exact same positions. The file size blew out from 131kb to 2787kb on one of the examples, but probably expected with Word vs PDF compressions.

In summary, it seems to work really well in my random sample size of 2 documents. Handy if you want to edit a publicly available PDF, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for this.

As pointed out by the person who emailed me, the site gets it’s revenue from adverts. I didn’t get paid anything to write this, so I must have been in a good mood.