Testing Outlook Web Access from the PowerShell

As any of my readers know I check things on a daily basis, typically in the morning. As part of these checks I fire up Internet Explorer 7 and go to our Outlook Web Access page and log in.

Today I figured out how to do all of this from a PowerShell, which has already cut my daily monitoring duties down about 90%. This is a pretty simple oneliner that will test one OWA url. It does however require you to enter a password in a dialog box.

Test-OWAConnectivity -url https://mail.yourdomain.com/owa -mailboxcredentials:)Get-Credential domail\user)

After you run that it will ask you for the password of the user and report back success or failure.

Spiceworks 1.7 Now Available

Spiceworks 1.7 is now available for download. The upgrade process is as painless as can be. Simply right click on the spiceworks tray icon and select restart. When the restart process is finished you will have the newest version.

Using the Powershell to check for mounted mailbox databases

If you want to quickly check to see what mailbox databases are mounted (or not mounted) there is a simple command that you can run from the Exchange Management Shell.

Get-Mailboxdatabase -status | where {$_.Mounted -eq $true}

To see what mailboxdatabaes are not mounted you can do:
Get-Mailboxdatabase -status | where {$_.Mounted -eq $false}

Let's break down what is going on here.
Get-MailboxDatabase will generally just return the list of mailbox databases in the organization.
The -Status switch will tell the command to get the status (Mounted, Last Full backup, et cetera).
We then pipe this into the where command to do the searching. The variable we are looking for here is Mounted and we need it to be equal (-eq) to True ($true).

Microsoft Exchange 2007: Autodiscovery

An interesting thing I learned with Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007, If you are running the latter than Exchange 2007 must have Autodiscovery installed and configured properly. Microsoft Technet has a decent article on how to set up and properly configure Autodiscovery.

It is importent to note that autodiscover.yourdomain.com has it's own seperate SSL certificate for things to work properly. This is an additional certificate to the one Outlook Web Access and Outlook Anywhere require to work properly.

How to: Fix Background Cleanup Errors

During my morning checks of the servers I run the command Test-Systemhealth on my Microsoft Exchange 2007 server and I was getting the error "The 'Background Cleanup' value for mailbox store '[Mailbox Store Name]' on Server '[Exchange Server Name]' is missing. This will cause mailbox size discrepancies.

To fix this I found a Microsoft Technet Article "Background Cleanup interval for a mailbox store is missing". It supplies an easy fix for my problem.

Open a registry editor, such as Regedit.exe or Regedt32.exe.
Navigate to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\\Private-

Create a DWORD value called Background Cleanup with value data of 60000 (decimal) or 0xEA60 (hexadecimal). Do this for each mailbox on the server.

Close the registry editor. To make the changes take effect, do one of the following:
Dismount and mount the affected information stores.
Restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service.

552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed maximum message size

If you are running Exchange 2007 and you are getting the above error message from users outside your organization there is a very simple fix.

Set-ReceiveConnector -identity "Default [SERVERNAME]" -maxmessagesize 20MB

That will double your receive limit from the internet. Now if you want to go bigger you could do:
Set-ReceiveConnector -identity "Default [SERVERNAME]" -maxmessagesize 1GB
but that is not recommened at all.
The available options for the size are: B (bytes), KB (kilobytes), MB (megabytes), & GB (gigabytes). The maximum you can do is 2GB and any unqualified sizes are treated as bytes.

If there are other options you want to change with your Receive Connectors check out Set-ReceiveConnector on TechNet.

Troubleshooting Tips: RPC over HTTP

While getting "Outlook Anywhere" to work in our Microsoft Exchange 2007 environment I had to do a little trouble shooting. Here are some things to look for if things are not working.

Make sure you are using Basic Authentication with the RPC proxy.
Triple check that Outlook Anywhere is enabled on the Microsoft Exchange 2007 server and that the RPC Proxy is installed.
Close Outlook and open it backup with the switch /rpcdiag (Start, Run, Outlook.exe /RPCDIAG).

Also since you are using Basic Authentication you must be using SSL. The SSL certificate must be trusted by the computer that is running Outlook, so I suggest it is a third party certificate that came from a reputable online source. You can only use self-signed certificates if all the computers that will be connecting to Outlook Anywhere are also part of the domain that created them.

Maybe I should do a complete series of how to's in regards to Outlook Anywhere and RPC over HTTP.