May 2005 - Posts
As we all know, there is much spam flowing throughout the Internet. Hotmail (amongst others) is a favorite location to send mail from or "spoof" for many spammers. MSN understands this and is fighting back. They have created a website dedicated to work with other large mail carriers out there and even provide some tools to allow ISP/ESP's to view mail straffic from hotmail to their registered IP's.
If you're a hoster providing email services (e.g. Hosted Exchange), you should really take a look.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I will be giving a session at HostingCon this year. The title is, "Rapid Deployment & Architecture of Microsoft Hosted Exchange". Here is a link to the abstract for the session: http://www.hostingcon.com/attend/session-detail.php?id=10.
I was doing much internal "soul searching" on how to cover so much of what's inside of Hosted Exchange. So, I finally came to the conclusion that I should give a high level overview and then drill-down into areas that seems to draw the most questions. Here are the major areas that I'll cover
- Architectual Overview
- Deployment Scenarios
- Good, Bad, Ugly
- Gotchas
At the end, attendees should understand what a Hosted Exchange deployment looks like, what they're getting into, and a "heads up" on issues they might run into and how to fix/workaround it.
So let's say you're a Hoster offering Hosted Exchange as a service to small and medium sized businesses (based on the Hosted Messaging & Collaboration 3.0 solution. What are the available options for your customer to use as a mail client? Here is a list:
Post Moved to: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2005/05/29/57.aspx
Scott Schnoll has nice list of tips for your Exchange Server environment.
http://www.awprofessional.com/articles/article.asp?p=170892&seqNum=3&rl=1
Microsoft has release two important patches for the Microsoft Provisoining System (MPS).
FIX: Event ID 5896 is logged every 15 to 60 seconds on a server that is running the Provisioning Audit and Recovery Service component in Microsoft Provisioning System 2.0
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=897664
FIX: You receive a "The parameter is incorrect" error message, and the CreateMailbox procedure does not succeed in Microsoft Provisioning System
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=899194
Both of these fixes requires a call into Microsoft PSS.
A component of the “Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging & Collaboration 3.0” (HMC) is Live Communication Server 2005 (LCS). HMC provides the ability to provision LCS services for all Hosted Exchange enabled organizations provisioned via the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS).
When you deploy Hosted Exchange via HMC, there is no requirement to deploy LCS in the environment. Once LCS is deployed in the environment, the HMC platform will begin to provision LCS for each new organization created and set the appropriate LCS settings for each user created.
When Exchange enabling an organization and creating a mailbox for a user, there is a call made to the “VerifyLCS_” procedure (which is in the “Managed Helpers” namespace) which checks the Active Directory Schema and sees if the LCS attribute extensions are present. If so, it will attempt to provision LCS for that organization.
When this happens, you’ll most likely see the below error response back from MPF when trying to Exchange enable an organization.
<errorContext description="Unable to add SIP Domain data. scriptErrorSource: wmiServer.ExecQuery, Error: Invalid class" code="0x80004005" executeSeqNo="167">
<errorSource namespace="Error Provider" procedure="SetError" />
<errorSource namespace="Managed Helpers" procedure="AddLCSDomain_" />
<errorSource namespace="Managed Helpers" procedure="AddLCSDomainToServers_" />
<errorSource namespace="Hosted Exchange" procedure="ExchangeEnableOrganization" />
</errorContext>
You could also see this error when you did deploy LCS in the environment, but have not installed the LCS Administration Tools on the MPF server.
So how do you resolve this issue?
Before you begin deploying LCS in your production Hosted Exchange environment (this of course assumes that you already have customers and are actively provisioning users and services), you should do this during a maintenance window and take down any customer facing front-end as they will receive errors until all LCS installation and configuration settings have been completed. Deploying LCS in your production environment is not something that you can quietly do in the background.
I noticed that many people were having this issue via the Windows Hosting Forums...
Issue:
During the deployment of MPS 2.0, you will get the following error in a browser when attempting to logon to the SampleWeb application.
Server Error in '/MPSSampleWeb' Application.
Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request.
Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length
Source Error:
|
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request.
Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using
the exception stack trace below.
|
Stack Trace:
[ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Length cannot be less than zero. Parameter name: length] System.String.Substring(Int32 startIndex, Int32 length) +172 MPSSampleWeb.classes.UserContext.setGroups(String path) +462 MPSSampleWeb.classes.UserContext.GetContext() +187 MPSSampleWeb.Global.Session_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e) +207 System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule.RaiseOnStart(EventArgs e) +132 System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule.CompleteAcquireState() +514 System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule. BeginAcquireState(Object source, EventArgs e, AsyncCallback cb, Object extraData) +697 System.Web.AsyncEventExecutionStep.System. Web.HttpApplication+IExecutionStep.Execute() +66 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep (IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +173 |
Resolution:
This post moved to: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2005/05/06/33.aspx
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