Sunday, February 22, 2009

PFDAVAdmin Tool - Exchange

PFDAVAdmin is an one of the useful tool in the exchange environment.The name PFDAVAdmin stands for Public Folder Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV)-based Administration tool. The following are the features..

1. Propagate public folder permissions.It is used to propagate public folder Access Control Entry (ACE) additions, removals and modifications without overwriting the existing Access Control List (ACL).
2. used to Rectify damaged Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACL).Bad DACL is caused due to the incorrect permission from the explorer or from other tool.
3. Import or export permissions against either mailboxes or public folders. This will be a handy option to have the portable different complex level of permission.
4. Setting up Calendar folder permissions in bulk.

Thanks
Logan

91-98414-99143

Garbage Collection and Tombstone object in AD

1. Garbage collection is a housekeeping process that is designed to free space within the Active Directory database. 

2. In Windows 2000 and in the original release version of Windows Server 2003, this process runs on every domain controller in the enterprise with a default lifetime interval of 12 hours. 

3. You can change this interval by modifying the garbageCollPeriod attribute in the enterprise-wide DS configuration object (NTDS) using ADSIEDIT.msc or ldp.exe. 

4. The Active Directory (AD) garbage-collection process performs two vital functions.First, it cleans up deleted objects. When you delete an object in AD, the system doesn't immediately delete the object because when replication occurs, a replication partner would recreate the object. Instead, the system uses a tombstone with a finite lifetime to mark the object as deleted. The tombstone replicates to all domain controllers (DCs), and after it expires, the garbage-collection agent deletes the object.

5. The garbage-collection process also performs online AD defragementation.

6. The default tombstone delete lifetime in windows 2000 and 2003 (w/o SP1) is 60 days. In 2003 Sp1, the value is increased to 180 days.

Thanks

Logan
91-98414-99143

ESEUTIL AND ISINTEG

ESEUTIL 

It is a life saver tool in maintainng the exchange database ie. , tool that manipulates Exchange's Extensible Storage Engine. This tool is similar to ntdsutil in term it manipulates with the Active directory.

/d - Performs off-line defragmentation/compaction of a database.
/r - soft recovery, bringing all databases to a consistent state or clean shutdown state.
/g - Verifies integrity of a database.It just fix the database tables but not the relation and others database stuff.That 
can be rectified by using the isinteg tool.
/m - Generates formatted output of various database file types. It is used to take the file dump.
/p - Repairs a corrupted or damaged database.
/y - Copies a database, streaming file, or log file.
/cc - Performs a hard recovery after a database restore.It is used to replay the logs after restoring from the backups.
/mh - to check the status/state of the mailbox store. To determine whether the last shutdown was clean or dirty. 
/mk - to check the last committed transastion log file into the database.
/ml - similar to /mh, except this switch performs an integrity check on log files.
/mm - Dumps metadata from the database file.

ISINTEG 

It is used to do some tests on your information store and to fix some detected errors and problems.ISINTEG is the only repair for exchange database engine. ESE is a generic database engine that can be used by different applications (Exchange, ActiveDirectory).
ESEUTIL looks into the database as just another ESE database, and can see their tables and indexes. ESEUTIL just fixes the database tables.Now it is time for ISINTEG. ISINTEG is aware of the relation between database tables and records that turn them into folders and messages.

Isinteg -fix -test alltests

In case of damaged database, the below is the idle steps...

1. Run Eseutil /P.
2. After Eseutil /P completes successfully, run Eseutil /D.
3. After Eseutil /D completes successfully, run Isinteg –fix –test alltests.

Thanks
Logan
91-9841499143