Exchange is down.

Cableguy

:eek:

Hi all,

Have a serious problem here and hope someone can help. Nobody can log into outlook. The partition that exchange is on is completly full so I know that is the problem.

How can I reduce the size of this? This is the only thing installed on this partition.

Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000.

layke

3 Options.

1) Clone the partition and move it to a larger disk.

2) Delete all/most of the archived emails that the server has backed up.

3) Use a prog like partition magic to resize the Partition.

Sorry there is not a lot more that can be done.

WizZard

You can also move a mailbox to another exchange server if there is one

But apart from that you're out of options

qwertz

If you happen to get the database started

WizZard wrote:

You can also move a mailbox to another exchange server if there is one

But apart from that you're out of options

WizZard

qwertz wrote:

If you happen to get the database started

Oops... I'll get my coat..

esskay

Have you tried using eseutil to defrag and compress the .edb database? There is a good tutorial on using it here
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/exchange2003/exchange2003_eseutil.htm

or you can do a search on microsoft.com for instructions. Actually here´s one on how to defrag the database.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254132/en-us
Hope this helps

qwertz

Are you using a single partition for Exchange or do you have separate ones for the stores and logs? And before you do anything silly make a backup!

Capt'n Midnight

you can do an offline defrag of the dB on another computer to free up space
and as the others have suggested if you have another partition you can move the edb to it (tricky but doable) and point exchange at it.

rather than partition magic you can use windows disk manager to expand the partition, if you don't have a big enough partiton you can put in a new drive and mirror the existing one to it and then break the mirror and expand it to the rest of the new drive ( exchange is mission critical so should be on redundant drives mirror/raid 5 anyway, these days most raid 5 arrrays will allow you to add in another drive to get extra space)

sirlinux

delete something off the drive , use ntfs compression on some folders on that drive to give you some space, get the store back on again. Get more drive space quick, if it's 2003 consider usung iscsi for the storage, it works quite well. Iomega do some great windows storage servers for the money, there are lots more

seamus

[Question for anyone]

Surely it should be possible to dismount the store, move it to a larger disk and remount it from that larger disk?

qwertz

Exchange isn't as easy as people think it is. A good technical source is msexchange.org.

seamus wrote:

[Question for anyone]

Surely it should be possible to dismount the store, move it to a larger disk and remount it from that larger disk?

aFlabbyPanda

just move the database to a new partition if available

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF001.html

seamus

qwertz wrote:

Exchange isn't as easy as people think it is. A good technical source is msexchange.org.

Heh. The link Brian posted would seem to suggest otherwise

That said, it is quite complex when you get past the easy bits of setting up users and stores.

Capt'n Midnight

seamus wrote:

That said, it is quite complex when you get past the easy bits of setting up users and stores.

complex is a good word
unforgiving is another, especially older versions with almost no undo facility

qwertz

I still like 5.5 best. Those were the days with decent daily rates...

JDxtra

Cableguy wrote:

The partition that exchange is on is completly full so I know that is the problem.

Nice system monitoring... :rolleyes: Do you still have a job?

MunsterCycling

Now now it can happen to anyone.... Snigger... LOL.... ROFL

Cableguy

Hi all,

Firstly thanks for all the reply`s and its great having a laugh at someone else`s expense to.

Good news is I have resolved the problem temporarily. Exchange is on a partition by itself well thats what I had thought untill I found it also shared it with the systems paging file of 1.5GB :eek: . So moving this to another partition solved my problem, well for now.

Thanks Quertz and Esskay for the info I am currently looking it up. There are about 25 users in the exchange database and its about four years old and I know its never been defragged or maintained so I know its well overdue. The database is now 29GB :eek: The users are know to send e-mail of up to 25mb.

Jdempsey I do still have a job and good point

No system monitoring

well am putting that inplace at the moment.

Also Quertz you said backup exchange before anything else is done and those are very wise words. What is the best way to back up exchange. Backup the entire exchange partition? Export to pst using exmerge? or use backup software like Backup Exec or Arcserve? Also can any of those be done in a live envoirement?

Thanks guys.

sirlinux

ntbackup will give you a good backup quickly, and you can do it live.

TimTim

Find the top 10 biggest mailboxes and get them to archive stuff locally to their pc.

Cableguy

TimTim wrote:

Find the top 10 biggest mailboxes and get them to archive stuff locally to their pc.

Cheers TimTim. Do you have to compact exchange after this or does the database automatically reduce in size?

qwertz

If you have a recent version of Backup Exec or Arcserve then use it, otherwise just use the build-in Windows Backup utility. Windows Backup is actually what MS recommends. Do a full online backup. Make sure it works. Lock it away.

If you have any mailboxes with deceased users (given that the email addresses aren't used anymore by somebody else) then use EXMERGE to copy their mailbox data to PST files. The convenient thing about this is if somebody asks for access to that data then you can just give them the relevant PST file on a CD/DVD and tell them to get lost. After EXMERGEing them and verifying that you can access the PST files just delete the mailboxes.

Regarding the offline defrag: Exchange by default does an online defrag every night (you might have customized that setting and changed the timeslot). In the event log you receive an entry telling you how much whitespace there is. If that's only a couple of hundered MB then an offline defrag will be pretty pointless. Don't bother unless you would free a significant amount of space. Also, and you probably know this already, the whitespace is reused by Exchage, it's not dead space in the database.

Hope my drool helps a bit. Feel free to correct if I made a mistake

zAbbo

If you ever need to extract info from the priv1.edb, get yourself PowerControls from Ontrack. It will allow you to pull from the .edb into a pst for backup/archiving purpose's.

Personally I'd just archive everything over 18months on each user.

sirlinux

TimTim wrote:

Find the top 10 biggest mailboxes and get them to archive stuff locally to their pc.

That really isnt a good strategy, how is he going to back them up?

seamus

Without creating a new thread, does anyone have any good ideas on archiving the transaction logs?

My idea at the moment is to run a script once a month which takes the transaction logs for the previous month (meaning that there's up to two months of logs on the server at any time), compresses them into a single archive (they're only text, they'll compress dead easy), and then moves them off the server.

Any better ideas? Anyone know of any simple ways to compress files without having to install winzip or something else?

Capt'n Midnight

sirlinux wrote:

ntbackup will give you a good backup quickly, and you can do it live.

As well as this use Exmerge this will dump all the mailboxes to individual PST's named after the account and it can be done live, and if you choose the option to not overwrite it's a lot faster after the first time. And recovering emails is as easy as opening the PST in Outlook.

forgot - but Exmerge can also REMOVE emails - might have been another way to remove junk - eg deleted items

ALSO its worth taking the system off line every so often to do a full backup -perhaps when other planned down time.

If using the non-enterprise version of exchange 5.5 and heading to 16GB it might be worth setting up a few dummy mailboxes that you can empty in a hurry to give you a bit of breathing space while the users clean their folders. Your MBTF mean time to failure goes down a bit but your MTTR mean time to recover goes down a lot

_CreeD_

This is kind've an aside but since this thread got me thinking about it....Has anyone ever tried using mount points to get around a space limitation? Say you were in a similar situation but could not move your data to a dif. area I'm thinking you could temporarily move your data out of it's parent folder, add a new drive/use a bigger partition but set it as a mount point to the data-folder and then move your data back. The data would be essentially sitting on the new drive/partition but accessed from the original location. Just how transparent are mount points? Would the services pick it up and fubar or would it fail under load?

Just curious if naybody's tried this?

seamus

_CreeD_ wrote:

This is kind've an aside but since this thread got me thinking about it....Has anyone ever tried using mount points to get around a space limitation? Say you were in a similar situation but could not move your data to a dif. area I'm thinking you could temporarily move your data out of it's parent folder, add a new drive/use a bigger partition but set it as a mount point to the data-folder and then move your data back. The data would be essentially sitting on the new drive/partition but accessed from the original location. Just how transparent are mount points? Would the services pick it up and fubar or would it fail under load?

Just curious if naybody's tried this?

Haven't tried it with Exchange, but I did try it with Distributed File System/File Replication, where I put the replicated/distributed data on a mount point. The services run at a level lower than the file/folder structure, so they just fell over when attempting to access the data - the service was told it was on a particular hard drive, but at the hardware level it existed on another hard drive, so the service couldn't locate it.

I would be wary of doing this in a live Exchange environment

_CreeD_

Ah, good to know, thanks for replying. If I get time I'll give it a go at least on vmware. See if it falls over too.

Stephen

sirlinux wrote:

That really isnt a good strategy, how is he going to back them up?

Extract the PST's to a local file & print server, use a logon script to get each user to map a drive to the F&P box and mount the PST in outlook from there.

Run normal backups every night on the file & print box.