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This is much easier in Exchange 2007 than it was in Exchange 2003 as here we can use PowerShell. I would like to mention that in case of using Ex 2007, we don’t even have to create the users in advance, the server will take care of that for you. For the full 2007 PowerShell reference guide please see this page http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123703%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx#NthruR

In short, in order to create a new user type in:

New-Mailbox -Name <String> -Database <DatabaseIdParameter> -Password <SecureString> -UserPrincipalName <String> [-DisplayName <String>] [-FirstName <String>] [-Initials <String>] [-LastName <String>]

You might notice that if you simply type a string in for the password you’ll get an error:

New-Mailbox : Cannot bind parameter 'Password'. Cannot convert value "[given_password]" to type "System.Security.SecureString". Error: "Invalid cast from 'System.String' to ‘System.Security.SecureString'."

The reason for this is that the given password has to be a secure string type. In order to create it, type in the following (has to be separate from the previous command):


$Password = ConvertTo-SecureString '<string>' -AsPlainText –Force

After this you could refer to the given password as $Password.

We usually use this command in two different ways. The first one is to use a scripting language (my preference is Python) to generate the commands with different names. I have a list with the thousand most popular first names and the thousand most popular surnames. My script simply combines the two, giving me quite a lot of options. The second method is to name the users using a counter such as User 1; User 2;… User n and use a cycle in PowerShell to generate all required user names, such as:

$Password = ConvertTo-SecureString '<password>' -AsPlainText –Force

for ($i=0; $i -le 10; $i++)

{

New-Mailbox –Name <name>$i -Database <dbname> -Password $Password -UserPrincipalName <UPname> -DisplayName "<name> $i" -FirstName <firstname> -LastName $i

}

If someone doesn’t like PowerShell or doesn’t have it (e.g. Exchange 2003), the batch files I mentioned earlier used in active directory work just fine. After creating the users using those the mailboxes can be assigned to them fairly easily. In Exchange 2007, we have to start the “create new mailbox” process and select “existing users” in the first window.

This will show all users in AD that don’t have mailboxes. Fortunately multiselection is allowed so we don’t have to handle them one by one. Exchange 2003 doesn’t have this feature but there’s an easy workaround. Do a search using Exchange 2003’s Active Directory Users and Computers application for all users and multiselect them. Right clicking once will open the context menu where we can select “Exchange tasks” and “Create exchange mailbox” from there.

Finally, the command to add full access rights to a specific user so all mailboxes could be opened (and managed) from one outlook:

foreach ($sg in Get-StorageGroup) { if ((Get-ExchangeServer
$sg.Server).Domain.Equals("DomainName.com")) { get-mailboxdatabase
-storagegroup $sg.Identity | add-adpermission -user UserName
-accessrights GenericAll; } }

Working on Exchange email archiving software and PST Importing tools we have a test network with quite a few virtual machines, many with Windows Server 2008 installed.

The first lesson learnt was to never try to create a virtual (or real) Windows 2008 network with less than 50 GB of hard drive space. The Windows installation itself takes up about 10 GB, and then everyone’s favourite the winsxs folder will just grow and grow,  and in the end you run out of disk space although you have nothing else on your C drive but a basic server installation and Exchange (Exchange installation that is, all relevant data files and databases are on a different drive of course).

Anyhow, after a while we found ourselves in a situation where we have a nice pool of complex networks with virtual machines and half of them are complaining about low disk space. The solution is to extend the virtual disk, but it’s not as easy as one might think.

First, you have to shut your virtual machine down, open a command prompt on your host and navigate to your VMware server installation where you’ll have to use vmware-vdiskmanager.exe as such:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe –x [Size][dimension] [path to virtual disk]

e.g.: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe –x 50Gb E:\virtual_machines\Medium\Exchange4\Exchange4.vmdk

Make sure that you specify the real virtual disk’s path and not the flat file or a partial slice (the tool’s error reporting is very poor on that regard). You also have to make sure that you have no snapshots for the computer in question otherwise the tool will refuse to work (with the proper error message this time at least).

If everything goes well, your virtual disk will be resized to the specified value after the process finished. The next step is to mount this drive into a different virtual machine, and edit its partitions using Disk Manager (built-in UI) or diskpart which is a built-in command line tool. If you choose the former, you’ll have to select the drive that you wish to make bigger, right click on it and select “extend”, while in diskpart type:

list volume
select volume [n]
extend

List volume lists all available volumes, with the select command you can select the one that is to be extended and type extend to carry out the action.

After all this, theoretically just unmount (remove) your disk from the second machine, start the first one up and it should all work fine.

It worked for Windows Vista, but my Windows 2008 failed to boot with the error:

Can’t find c:\Windows\System32\winload.exe the file is missing or corrupted

This seemed vaguely familiar, I thought it’s just the old “NTLDR is missing or corrupted” that I was always able to fix using the installation disk. I was looking forward to have some built-in tool in the installer that might just have been developed to fix such issues. To my surprise, there was none.

The repair options were “Restore computer”, “Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool” and “Command Prompt”. Unfortunately Restore Computer needs a backup file to work with that I obviously didn’t have (virtual test machine) and rebuilding it wasn’t an option as it was one of my exchange servers in the system… I started to get rather upset and stressed about it and began googling for the problem desperately.

The first few hits were of no help and at some point I even wandered around Microsoft’s TechNet forum where I read that the start-up repair option was removed from 2008 per design (!?). It wasn’t easy, but after several unsuccessful searchers I found another blog post with the solution:

Execute next commands in repair mode (Vista / Win2k8):
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {default} device partition=c:
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {default} osdevice partition=c:
c:\windows\system32\bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=c:

It worked like a charm, my system could boot without any problems and I didn’t have to waste a day to reinstall the server and exchange.

The first step was the easiest – create around a hundred machines in different organisational units in active directory.

We needed this part as our Search wizard queries Active Directory for computers in the system. The user than can select the computers they wish to search for PST files. The grid where they are displayed and various features around selection should be tested, but at this stage it is enough if the computer is simply created in Active Directory. You can go to your Domain Controller, run “Active Directory Users and Computers” management console, right click on any container, select “New” and select “Computer”. This way you can create any computer in your AD tree without physically having it in your system. If one desires to create a larger amount of computers, doing it manually really shouldn’t be an option, in which case a simple .bat file solves the problem.

To create an OU where the new computer(s) should go:

dsadd ou "OU=[name_of_OU],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]"

For embedded OUs:

dsadd ou “OU=[name_of_OU_child2], OU=[name_of_OU_child1], OU=[name_of_OU_parent],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]”

To add the computer:

dsadd computer "cn=[computer_name],ou=[ou_name(s)],dc=[name_of_domain],dc=[name_of_domain]" -uc

And now that we have the window open anyway, to add a user:

dsadd user "CN=[user_name],OU=[name_of_ou],DC=[name_of_domain],DC=[name_of_domain]" -samid [name_of_user (SAM id)] -upn [user_name@fqdn]
-fn [First_name] -ln [last_name] -display "[display_name]" -pwd [password]

This enables us to test most of the basic grid functionality and enablement. In order to check that these non-existing machines are handled correctly when the PST agent is installed on them our developers created a “data faker”, that browses the AD tree to get all computer names and we can set all available statuses for the computers found. This data faker is used to simulate search results as well.

We usually do a script that creates these user/computer names with an incrementing counter, but in some cases it might be a collection of really nasty characters/deeply embedded OUs or other special cases.

*Coming up in Part 2 – Reka will cover scripts to create mailboxes in Exchange 2007, and how to modify access rights on them.