This week was pretty hectic for me, besides my regular workload, I had a few technical issues that were tricky to figure out (seems like I wasn’t the only one having fun this week)…

Exchange server stuck in boot process at Applying Computer Settings
Over at CopticOrphans.org, their Microsoft Exchange server went out thanks to a power outage (it was the one server not plugged into a UPS), it got stuck during boot with the message “Applying Computer Settings”. While I couldn’t remote desktop into the machine, I was able to access the event logs remotely but nothing conspicuous was listed. We rebooted into safe mode without any problems, but once again nothing seem out of the ordinary. Finally, I booted the machine normally with a network connection and it completed the boot process. I logged in and ran the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer, the health report mentioned that it couldn’t find or access the Exchange Domain Servers group in Active Directory. I logged into their domain controller and found a new organizational unit (OU) called CO Groups, inside were some new groups as well as all the system groups. I copied all the system groups including Exchange Domain Servers back to the Users OU. I rebooted the Exchange server and everything came back up normally.

Can’t open attachments on messages in Exchange Public Folders
Back at church, our receptionist couldn’t open attachments in one of the public folders on the Exchange server. I have our phone system send all the general voice mails as WAV files to a public folder, she could access attachments in other public folders but not this one. When trying to open or save the attachment it would pop up a message saying that she didn’t have the appropriate rights or permissions. After checking permissions on the public folder and make sure there was enough drive space on her desktop, I figured something must be corrupted in her Windows profile so I backed it up and created a new profile for her…worked like a charm.

Partially upgraded Microsoft Access database
One of our super tech volunteers called me last night, he was having problems trying to repair an Access 2003 database that belonged to friend of his. The Access database was throwing an error that it was partially upgraded from an older version and the conversion did not complete. We tried to import the data into a new database, but it would throw the same error, we tried to open the database with OpenOffice.org Base and Office 2007 but it could only access the forms and queries, not the tables (where the data is stored). Finally, we ended up trying the Recovery for Access demo and it worked.