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i am exchange server impaired 3

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mcrumpton

Technical User
Jul 8, 2003
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I have no idea about exchange servers except to know that i need to reboot it. How do i do that?? Please give detailed non-admin personality responses. If it is too much it might be over my head. I am reasonably intelligent but I have never cared to learn about servers and currently having it forced on me.
 
Your company should send you to Exchange training. Exchange can be quite a monster to deal with. Here's instructions that I wrote for our OPS people to restart an Exchange 5.5 server that is running an an NT 4.0 OS.

1. On the server, choose “start”, “settings”, and then “control panel”

2. Double click on “services”

3. Find the “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant” service and click “stop”

4. You will be prompted that the other Exchange Services will be stopped, click “ok”

5. Once the services have stopped, click “close” on Control Panel

6. Click “start”, then choose “shutdown” and “restart the computer”

7. When the server comes back online, login to the server. Wait a couple of minutes and then go back to “services” (located under “start”, “settings”, “control panel”) to verify that the following services status is “started”: Microsoft Exchange Directory, Microsoft Exchange Information Store, Microsoft Exchange Message Transfer Agent, Microsoft Exchange System Attendant, Microsoft Internet Mail Service.
 
Wow that is news to me. I thought that it was automatic. When a server is rebooted aren't services stopped and restarted? no I haven't been to any exchange classes either and am learning as fast as I can.

RC
 
Hmm, it is automatic, sort of. Thing is, if you just do a Restart of the server, it will try and shut all the services down anyway. Because of all the dependencies, though, it's less efficient than stopping the services in the order of the dependencies. Backas' instructions don't really buy you much advantage, as stopping the SA will forcefully stop all the other services as well - just like a Restart or Shutdown does. Better to stop them in the right order, one at a time, then you don't get any resource conflicts or other transient problems. For the 4 'core' services, think of MIDS - that's the order to shut them down in (MTA first, SA last). When (if) restarting them manually, do it in reverse order (SA first, MTA last). If you're running other services on any of your servers (Fax, IMS, Mailbox Manager etc) then just work out where they sit in the dependency chain and slot them right in.
 
Well it is generally automatic, although I still recommend becka's method. I've always stopped the larger services such as (Exchange, backupexec) manually before restarting. I then check they have all started okay when it has finised loading.

I know how you feel being thrown in at the deep end, I heartily recommend taking a read through these pages regularly. It's amazing how much you can pickup and remember when the time comes to use it.
 
Thank you all for your response. Ends up that our problem is not exchange related but rather domain related. Our domain expired a couple of days ago and we weren't receiving notifications. Well, our ex-admin account was but we haven't been checking that b/c he receives something like a 1000 emails a day of spam. I do appreciate the info and will mark it to keep an eye on.
 
Great mcrumpton. I'm glad to hear that.

I feel that I should probably defend my documentation. I don't know about everyone else's Exchange servers, but if I do not stop the Exchange services on my servers before they are rebooted, the reboot takes about a half an hour to complete (as opposed to taking five minutes when stopping the Exchange services first). That's why I manually stop the Exchange services. This might just be an Exchange 5.5/NT 4.0 problem, I'm not sure. I agree that stopping the Exchange services manually is not completely necessary but in my case, I normally don't have a half an hour to wait for the servers to come back up so I take this extra step.

In regards to the order of stopping the services, all I can say is that I was taught this by a certified Microsoft Exchange instructor when I took the Administering Exchange 5.5 course. I really don't know why the instructor taught me to stop the services this way but it has worked for me.
 
mcrumpton
Good to know it's all sorted out ;)

beckas
We use 5.5 on NT4 aswell and have the same problem, it seems to sit on the shutdown screen/process for a long long time (not 30 minutes but close) unless we manually close down the services.
 
Copy this into Notepad and save it as a batch file, e.g. "SstopExch.bat"



net stop msexchangeMTA
net stop msexchangeIS
net stop msexchangeDS
net stop msexchangeSA
exit

Put it on your desktop and doubleclick it when you want the services shutdown.
EB
 
If you use the above batch file, consider adding "/y" after each NET STOP command.

This will automate the process to reduce likelihood of "are you sure?" messages when command line NET STOP is used.

example:

net stop msexchangeMTA /y
net stop msexchangeIS /y
net stop msexchangeDS /y
net stop msexchangeSA /y
 
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