Speed up your SBS 2008 slow shutdown

A new build of SBS 2008 can shut down really slow. I mean reallllly slow. 15 or 20 minutes. This is Exchange having problems shutting down while all the other services shut down as well. The fix is simple. Add a script to shutdown in group policy that will shutdown Exchange first.

First create a file named Exchstop.cmd and save it to C:\Windows\Exchstop.cmd. In this file needs to be the following.

net stop msexchangeadtopology /y
net stop msftesql-exchange /y
net stop msexchangeis /y
net stop msexchangesa /y
net stop iisadmin /y


Now in the Default Domain Controller Policy go to

Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Setting > Scripts > Shutdown

Click Add and browse to c:\windows\Exchstop.cmd

Click OK

Now see how fast your server shuts down.

Office 2007 trial troubles when downgrading to Office 2003

HP desktops are now showing up with a trial version of Office 2007 installed. Since I still have a ton of clients that use Office 2003 the routines is to remove the 2007 version and load up 2003. This seems to work just fine if you don't open any Office 2007 products before you remove the product, BUT.... if you open any of the Office 2007 trial products it runs though a little installation wizard and installs some files on the new system. When you uninstall 2007 everything appears normal, but the uninstall doesn't clean up everything. When you install Office 2003 everything appears fine as well until you try to either configure Outlook or access the Exchange Global Access List (GAL). The symptoms are you don’t have access to the GAL and you can’t really do anything with the mail profile. The problem is that the Outlook MAPI service is screwed up because of some of the files the Office 2007 uninstall left behind. The fix is to do a search for the Mapisvc.inf file on the desktop and delete all instances. Then launch Outlook and recreate the mail profile.

Exchange 2003 clients being prompted for their password

I see a lot of Exchange 2003 clients being prompted for their password when they launch Outlook using RPC over HTTP. Here's a blog post on how to fix that.

http://www.andreasroom.com/blog/archive/2005/06/17/RPCHTTP.aspx

Exchange certificates starting to expire....

As our SBS and Exchange 2003 installations are getting older we are starting to the self-signed certificates we created expire. Here is a great guide o getting them renewed.

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/SSL_Enabling_OWA_2003.html

Look at all of these MMC snapins

This guy has taken the time to document them. Some you will say duh I know that. Some re a little more obscure. They can really shorten troubleshooting. End user go Start > Run and type lusrmgr.msc boom your straight into user manager.

http://www.wilsonmar.com/1mmcs.htm