Exchange Server 2003 and SBS issues [Solved]

bowen

So, I'm sitting here and all of a sudden our Exchange server is not working. No big deal, nothing that I've probably not fixed before. Boy, how wrong was I? It seems that, for some reason, MAD.exe and all the useful information store services (and their dependencies) won't start and the only information I can seem to find in the logs is some useless error codes that seem to be related to about 8 different situations.

Want them? Here:

• The MAD monitoring thread was unable to read its configuration from the DS, error '0x80010002'
• Permanent failure reported by policy group provider for 'CN=System Policies, CN=(DOMAIN HERE), CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=(DOMAIN HERE),DC=local':'MAD.EXE', error=80040103. Taking provider offline.

I can't seem to find any useful information. I have tried restarting the Information Store, and their services, but every time I try I get these same messages.

Any ideas? I'd appreciate it. Thanks in advance guys.

Feral

Is Exchange running on your SBS box or on a different box?

BTW, SBS sucks. I'd put money down that if you migrated off of SBS onto "real" MS Server + Exchange your problem would go away.

bowen

Feral wrote: »

Is Exchange running on your SBS box or on a different box?

BTW, SBS sucks. I'd put money down that if you migrated off of SBS onto "real" MS Server + Exchange your problem would go away.

No doubt, I'm considering it with some of the problems we've been having recently.

And yes, it's on the SBS box, as the PDC.

I'm gathering it's got something to do with some stupid rollback issues we had like 6 months back.

bowen

Okay, new development.

Seems my previous issue was related to some sort of delegation of rights in the group policy getting fudged up. Got it resolved.

Now, before I pull my hair out, SMTP seems to not want to deliver mail to the users. Mail gets to the server no problem, from inside and outside the location, and everything is hunky dorey, however, it refuses to deliver the mail to the recipient.

Am I missing something else here? I've gone through, again, everything I think I should be going through. This time, there's no errors other than "Failure, retry attempt #". Any help guys?

PirateJon

Nothing in the event log? Have you run the exchange BPA?

Have you looked at the message tracking tool to see where the emails are going?

.... aaand it looks like they have an SBS BPA now too. Neat.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;940439

bowen

Yeah, it just says they're been successfully delivered locally and it's attempting to retry local delivery. Nothing else, the BPA shows that everything checks out (at least for SBS itself).

PirateJon

This is sending mail out, yes? Can you telnet to port 25 on your upstream relay or destination from the SBS server?

bowen

Yup, outgoing is working no problem. The local delivery is where this all boils down to fucking up.

PirateJon

First I'd try verifying the system mailboxes. Especially if permissions have been fucked with.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828938

then add more logging and see if you get something meaningful.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823489

bowen

PirateJon wrote: »

First I'd try verifying the system mailboxes. Especially if permissions have been fucked with.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828938

then add more logging and see if you get something meaningful.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823489

Unfortunately the logging didn't turn up anything meaningful either. The support article in the first link is rather confusing (I've never used LDAP editor or the ADSI browser -- this domain was not set up by me either), I can't find the offending locations or find the system mailboxes. (Although using ADSI I do see they're there and everything looks right, it's pointing to the right domain anyways)

PirateJon

If the inbound smtp mail is stuck in a delivery queue, there has to be a reason. Either the mail doesn't know where to go (routing) or it can't get there (transport/store). Did you up logging on MSExchangeIS and MSExchangeTransport service SMTP store driver components? That's where the problem probably is.

Otherwise, you can start here: troubleshooting section of the exchange transport and routing guide.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996992%28EXCHG.65%29.aspx

bowen

Seems to be an issue with bridgehead mode? When I was messing around with settings I must've accidentally set it up for bridgehead mode. Any ideas? I'll keep looking for info on this myself.

PirateJon

Do you have more than one mail server?

Bridgehead means the box routes mail to other mail servers. Kinda like front-end / back end. You can check the bridgehead setting if you go to ESM, expand admin groups, expand your domain, expand routing groups, expand your domain, expand connectors, then check the properties of the Internet mail service.

At the bottom of the general tab you'll see your local bridgeheads. Mine shows <servername> as the default SMTP virtual server.

bowen

It just shows the single server, that's it. No, we don't have any backup servers, and after this whole nightmare I'm thinking about setting up a stupid IMAP/SMTP server on a Linux box.

PirateJon

That sounds ok... its weird you can't find more meaningful events. Well since you're about out of options, do you guys have exchange support? Per-incident from MS gets kinda pricy, so we buy incident packs through HP.

I can point you at a good exchange replacement if you're not just venting.

bowen

PirateJon wrote: »

That sounds ok... its weird you can't find more meaningful events. Well since you're about out of options, do you guys have exchange support? Per-incident from MS gets kinda pricy, so we buy incident packs through HP.

I can point you at a good exchange replacement if you're not just venting.

If you could please, at least until I can figure this out.

PirateJon

http://www.communigate.com/enterprise/products.html

It's like $900 for 25 users. A buddy of mine is running it on a Mac server and says it's never gone down. The neat thing is it lets people still use outlook and the webmail interface is way nicer than OWA.


Oh and when you do nail this, could you post details? Knowledge = power and all that.

bowen

Thanks for that, I'll let you know for sure.

I'd hate to have anything like this happen to someone else. I do think I'm gaining some headway, it turns out it may have been related to DHCP. I'll let you know.

bowen

Problem is solved. I found out that after all this, it was because the Netlogon service was paused after an updated for some reason. Once I unpaused it, and started all the services, everything was hunky dorey and we can now send and receive email.

Thanks for all your help Jon, sometimes it helps to have another pair of eyes on the problem (and sometimes it's something completely stupid).