MS Exchange – 9/8/2008
Today’s class was the grand finale of sorts — we finished up the book on Exchange! I don’t mind telling you that this was the first class that I’ve been able to finish this class with — as Exchange doesn’t seem to like virtualization, at least not with VMWare or Virtual PC (especially Virtual PC).
Anyway, to wind the book down, we had a number of discussions — just because it was the last day doesn’t mean that it was a light day. We started out talking about backing up and restoring. Backups and restores — while there is a similar component in Exchange 2003 — are quite different than our typical backup plans. First, the actual “thing” we backup is the information store. Secondly, transaction logs play a large part in how the backup works. Transaction logs are basically the written summarizations of what has gone on with the server — that I’ve sent an e-mail to this person, that I’ve deleted this particular e-mail, etc. How it works in practice is that I’ll back up my information store, and then if and when I ever need to restore it, I’ll restore the store (still with me?) and “replay” the transaction logs to fill in the blanks.
Chapter Eleven covered monitoring of the Exchange servers. In the interest of time, we skipped through a portion of this, focusing primarily on a couple of labs towards the end regarding queues (quee-weez) and the eseutil tool.
Chapter Twelve, the grand finale, regarded troubleshooting steps we could take with our Exchange servers. In a way, the entire class has been an exercise in troubleshooting Exchange, but some specific things that we covered dealt with using netdiag and dcdiag tools to troublshoot our networks and domain controllers, respectfully.
Other activities dealt with setting up alerts in Performance Monitor (perfmon!) dealing with backed up queues (quee-weez), etc.
Now, I have a piece of important information that I’d like to share with you guys. I’m very proud to make this announcment and since it has to do with the class grades, hopefully no one will be upset with me publishing this out on the good ol’ Internet. But here it goes anyway.
Once again, no one in here is required to take the final. To be completely frank, I was shocked — I was certain that I would be seeing some of you, but once the grades had been crunched, Excel (ok, OpenOffice Calc) verifyed that, yes indeedy, every one of you is exempt!!! I’ll be e-mailing you individually with your grades if you don’t already know them and you can decide whether or not you’d like to try to take the final — I’ll leave that up to you. I’ll be here next week either way.
Now, since this is the technical-last-day-of-class, there won’t be any homework or anything that I’ll be taking up as an assignment. This does not preclude you from reading the chapters or doing the homework, for your own personal growth! I’d highly recommend doing both if for nothing else, to round out your knowledge of MS Exchange.
Homework:
- Enjoy the few weeks you have off, and come back refreshed and ready to go!!!
