Vacation
I was out of the state in DC/Virginia for 8 working days this month as well as 3 weekends limiting the available time for changes/work.
Exchange DR RM
Been working diligently with EMC onsite trying to get our Exchange DR issues resolved. The flare upgrade on the Clariion from 24 to 26 caused the RMSE product to not be supported despite direct concern and questions to EMC of this. EMC has provided the RM product for us to upgrade to. Initial runs of the product were successful in both the test and production environment. Subsequent incremental runs in the production environment have not been successful and efforts to identify the issue causing this have been for naught thus far. Fifty plus hours have been spent this week by me alone working with EMC directly to keep the pressure on and working to attempt to resolve the issue.
Exchange DR Replistor
There was a vulnerability identified in the Replistor version 6.1 SP2 that we had installed. Previous installation of 6.1 SP5 crashed MAILBE13 and the change was aborted. This was a follow up of that with an upgrade to 6.2 SP4. Upgrade went smoothly with no issues. Replication of the Exchange Database Logs is working without problems again. This is one part of our Exchange DR strategy. This portion keeps the transaction logs synchronized between data centers. With any current copy of the database these logs can be applied to the database to bring us to a specific point in time.
DPM for Sharepoint
The DPM server is built and has been tested in backing up a file share. Test Sharepoint farm has been moved to the 10.2.170.x network to allow testing of DPM sharepoint backups. Agents have been loaded on the test sharepoint servers (itssharept01, itsproject01 and its-hcwnap32-ts) and registered with the DPM server. We are currently waiting on the test SQL cluster to be moved to the 10.2.170.x network also. Once this is done agents will be installed on these also. This will allow us to move forward with testing DPM’s capability to backup sharepoint at a high level and restore granularly.
Chancellor Public Folder Fix
Created chancellor@vanderbilt.edu public folder for all incoming mail to be delivered to. There is an application that is utilized to sort and manage these messages. It was not able to manage messages that were stored in Note format. Default behavior for Exchange 2003 public folder messages being delivered from external Exchange cloud is storing the message in IPM.Post format. After consulting with the MC Exchange team to ensure that our change would not affect them I applied a registry change to our Public Folder Back End servers that changed the behavior of incoming public folder messages so they would be stored as IPM.Note format (or look like mail messages rather then notes). This resolved the issue for the application managing the folder.
PRT1 Spooler fix and scramble to avoid crash
While oncall a space warning appeared for PRT1. In investigating this I noticed that there was a print job spooling to the data drive that eventually grew to over 3G in size. Quick work moving data off the C drive as the job grew kept the OS drive from filling up and crashing the server. Subsequent change that evening added a second drive to the box and moved all the print queues to this drive.
April Microsoft Patches
Applied to test servers and workstation groups in proper order for testing. Scheduled change for ITS production servers and Roland monitored the application of them while I was on vacation. Applied same patches to the Exchange Servers the following week. Adding one Hotfix associated with the DR RM project/work effort.
Magic Tickets
16 Magic Tickets closed
4 worked on and forwarded
Various AD tickets forwarded to the AD team. After a discussion I had with Brian Britt on the AD team last month before I went on vacation I have started forwarding any AD related tickets onto the Directory Services team.