Time: 7:00AM
This morning I got up early to go over to my dads house to put my engine back together in one of my cars, as I was waiting for a friend to arrive who was going to give me a hand. I noticed I did not receive my normal morning e-mails, I.E. System Attendant, WSUS Server reports. On top of that my iPhone was giving me a server error when even trying to check my e-mail.
First thing I attempted was web access of course, which also gave me an error. I did not have my work laptop with me as i normally do not have any issues on a Sunday. I recently purchased logmein for the iPhone, although I have used it once or twice for simple desktop fixes for my company, I have not had a chance to use it for as something as mission critical as fixing the exchange server. I loged into a desktop at work with logmein, the preceded to use Remote Desktop to access the exchange server. Sure enough, the backup failed and the log drive filled up.
After a few choice cuss words. I was able to get all the stores mounted except two, which took longer becuase I had to do a consistancy check to repair the database to get it to mount, luckly the two stores that had problems were the archive store, and a store which houses generic service accounts of no importance for our web application. After 30 minutes of scaning and fixing the databases with exchange commands, I was able to get those two stores to mount.
All this I was able to do from my iPhone, with LogMeIn Ignition, from my dads steps leeching off his wifi. One of the best investiments I’ve made in a while. This Saved me an hour of driving to go home and get on my laptop. Best thing is, no users are the wiser about what transpired.
Great use of logmein! I’ve had to use ssh on my android phone to restart MySQL on one of our more flaky servers, something I wouldn’t have been able to do years ago.
As for exchange, up until recently we had some pretty major issues with the backup server so I ended up enabling circular logs just in-case. We do a *lot* of electronic faxing and majority of our 200+ users have large (2gb+) mailboxes with tif images coming and going along with various other attachments so logs fill up extremely quick. Luckily Backup Exec has been rock solid after a few updates and logs get backed up before they end up being overwritten.
Personally I hate circular logging, last admin had it enabled when the power went out….last backup he had was two weeks before. Needless to say I had a helva time getting everything up and running. He resigned 30 minutes after the server came up and realized he didn’t have a recent backup.
We got away from Backup Exec, shortly after this happened. I made the push to switch to Barracuda Networks Backup Service. That coupled with a Barracuda Message Archiver has pretty much eliminated any of the hassles when backing up the Exchange Server.
All of our storage groups combined ranks in at a total of 600GB. I am about to start enforcing quota’s, needed to wait for the Archiver to catch up and finish indexing all the new mail, and previous mail.
My hats off to Barracuda for making very simple hassle free products, with a set it and forget it mentality.