MSExchangeDiagnostics Crashing

After running through one of my newly built Exchange 2016 CU1 Servers, I noticed I had a few errors within the event viewer as shown below.

The description for Event ID 1007 from source MSExchangeDiagnostics cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range.
at PlaLibrary.DataCollectorSetClass.start(Boolean Synchronous)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Diagnostics.PerformanceLogger.PerformanceLogSet.StartLog(Boolean synchronous)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Diagnostics.PerformanceLogger.PerformanceLogMonitor.CheckPerflogStatus()
ExchangeDiagnosticsPerformanceLog

The handle is invalid

The description for Event ID 4999 from source MSExchange Common cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

35200
E12IIS
c-RTL-AMD64
15.01.0396.030
M.E.Diagnostics.Service
M.E.Diagnostics.PerformanceLogger
M.E.D.P.PerformanceLogSet.StartLog
System.ArgumentException
95c6
15.01.0396.030
False
True
Microsoft.Exchange.Diagnostics.Service

The handle is invalid

The description for Event ID 1039 from source MSExchangeDiagnostics cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

C:\

Exception
System.Management.ManagementException: Invalid namespace
at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode)
at System.Management.ManagementScope.InitializeGuts(Object o)
at System.Management.ManagementScope.Initialize()
at System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher.Initialize()
at System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher.Get()
at Microsoft.Exchange.Diagnostics.Service.DiagnosticsService.DriveLocked(String diagnosticsRootDrive)

The handle is invalid

Anil over at MSFT posted a very nice fix for Exchange 2013 when following the same procure for on my Exchange 2016 CU1 server successfully remedied the issue and the errors were resolved. If you are experiencing the same events , please check out this article on how to resolve it.

Outlook Chaced Mode Email Delay

Since Outlook 2010 I have been running in online mode to allow me to see "real-time" updates to AD Photos and GAL related items. so I was boggled when a coworker said that on occasion in outlook 2013 he would get new emails in batches. So I spun up a VM with 2013 at the same patch level as him and low and behold I noticed a delay from when the message hit my mailbox according to Outlook Web App & ActiveSync. Running Outlook 2016 on my primary client I to notice the issue when in cached mode. after digging through a very long TechNet thread, I found this article posted by Jeff Guillet over at his blog. his article provide some great insight as to how outlook behaves once it is notified of a new message when running in cached mode.

while this change outlined by Jeff will have a slight performance hit to your Exchange environment it may be help deal with users who notice the delay. when I applied the changes I was not as aggressive and set the values to 10.

Here is the registry Key for Outlook 2016

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\Outlook\Cached Mode]
"Download"=dword:0000000a
"Upload"=dword:0000000a
"Maximum"=dword:0000000a


hope this helps, till next time

Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 Mailbox Move Bug

Over the past few months I have been working to get our organization upgraded from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013. During one of more recent mailbox moves for some of our test users, we stumbled across an interesting issue with Exchange 2013 and Outlook once the mailbox migration was completed.


Scenario
- Exchange 2010 Server SP3 RU 11
- Exchange 2013 Server CU10
- Users Mailbox on Exchange 2010 has not only a mailbox but also an Exchange archive mailbox.
- An online mailbox move of both the mailbox and archive is initiated to move the mailbox to Exchange 2013

Issue
As the mailbox move is completing, the user get the obligatory "The Microsoft Exchange administrator has made a change that requires you to quit and restart Outlook” . After the user restarts Outlook, everything looks fine until they try to access there archive mailbox. upon trying to access there archive they get an error "Cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opened. Microsoft Exchange is not available. Either there are network problems or the Exchange server is down for maintenance." This was puzzling as user could access there archive via Outlook Web App with out issue. now one of the odd things I noticed was that users were getting the notice to restart outlook prior to Exchange showing it was 100% done with the mailbox/archive move.

Fix
So after some troubleshooting mainly on the client side, I opened a Premier Support Ticket with Microsoft. After describing my issue to the support specialist he suggested I move another user and reproduce the issue and then recycle the Autodiscover Application Pool. Much to my surprise, I was able to reproduce the issue again and upon recycling the Autodiscover Application pool, the user got yet another prompt to restart outlook. After that the user was able successfully access both there mailbox and archive mailbox.

Premier support indicated to me that this is currently an active bug within Exchange 2013.

to workaround this issue, I have created a little PowerShell script to recycle the Autodiscover ApplicationPool on all my Exchange 2013 servers.





Hope this helps.

HTTP 400 Bad Request When Proxying a Different Version of Exchange

As a part of an Exchange 2010 to 2013 Upgrade project I am working on I hit a sporadic issue of users not able to access Outlook or getting an "HTTP 400 Bad Request" Error after signing in to OWA.

In the midst of doing some quick searching on the error as I knew it was user issue and found this article from Microsoft about token bloat.

I had found several other article about token bloat and some of the users having the issue had 100+ groups. I followed the guidance and added the follow Registry Keys on the Exchange 2010 Client Access Servers.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters

MaxRequestBytes DWORD 65536 (Decimal)

MaxFieldLength DWORD 65536 (Decimal)

Once added you will need to restart the sever for the changes to take effect.

The above change will increase the header size to 65KB which is the max value

I would recommend that if you are in a large enterprise environment or if your users are a part of a large number of groups that you set these values prior to swinging your namespace to the newer version of Exchange.

Exchange 2013 CU10 Application Event Warning 1310

Working through a fresh install of Exchange 2013 CU10 I noticed within my event viewer an application error with the source of ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0 and the event ID of 1310 after doing some looking I found thanks to Garry Cooper over at Exchange Masters blog found that this looks to a little known installation bug. I as able to resolve by copying the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\ClientAccess\SharedWebConfig.config file from a good install to the other servers that were missing the file.

Shavlik Bulliten ID to QNumbers

Recently I have started to help with our monthly patching at our organization. Being a healthcare facility we have a few applications in which we are only allowed to deploy specific patches to those servers. To help speed up the process of preparing patch groups and patch scans within Savlik Protect, I have created a PowerShell Script to take a list of Bulletin IDs (MS15-001) and export a list of associated QNumbers which can then be used to import into shavlik when creating a patch scans. I hope to create a future script to allow bulk updating of an existing patch group with a list of known patches.

Cisco 7861 Speed Dial Template

Here is a nice speed dial template I created for the Cisco 7861 Phone. This template is a directory style mail merge to allow your excel sheet to have one row for each phone you need a line card printed for. One page will have 6 line cards when the merge is finished.

Here is a link to download the file. Download Template

Enjoy!