Greetings boys and girls.
Here's a real kicker for ya to chew on.
over the last 2 weeks, I've been building myself a cold redundant site for our domain in the event of a catastrophe (well.. ya never know!).
I will explain what I have done up to this point.
I have used 3 machines to do this.
1) I installed a white-box as a BDC in my current domain. Once installed, I removed it (physically) from our domain and onto it's own seperate hub, and promoted it to PDC.
2) Installed an NT 4.0 SP6 box equivalent to our Production Exchange 5.5 SP4 Server. I created Partition identical in size to that of the production server. I used the same Org and Server/Site names during the installation, and even put all the files in the same place.
3) I installed a BlackBerry server, and installed all the Add-In's in to the Exchange server.
All connectors are installed properly. All appropriate service accounts were created and given the correct rights.
At this stage, we installed Vertias Backup Exec on the Exchange server. And Sybari Antigen (these two things add files to Exchange).
I catagorized the 5 tapes that holds my last full backup, and all the incrementals.
The backups are ONLINE backups.
So.. this is how I recovered.
I used a Restore of a Full Backup of the Directory Store that was 2 weeks older than the IS full Backup. (Age of the DS is irrelevant - however I find that using an older DS restore is better)
Then I did a restore of the IS from our LAst full backup.
Once finished.. i ran eseutil -p /ispriv and eseutil -p /ispub from my large partition (I copied c:\exchsrvr\bin to my e:\drive because the repairs cache everything to a file that becomes huge... you need at least 40% of the size of your Stores in space.)
Then i tried to run the isinteg -patch. This failed, do to Jet_errBadLogFile ... so I went into my registry and deleted the:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CurrentControlSet\SERVICES\MSEXCHANGE_IS\RestoreInProgress
Ran the isinteg -patch
Deleted the Log files
And all the services started just fine.
This restore is fine upto the last full backup .. and the server is fully operational.
NOW ... when I restore the incrementals -- it pooches everything .. because, I find that i have to delete the log files in order to get the IS running again.. which is useless because, I need the log files to bring the IS up to date.
ISINTEG -PATCH will run.. it says it updates the database.. however, service will not start.
I've tried defragging the DB.
I've tried restoring the DS again to an older DS.
I've tried the repair tool.
It always comes back to deleting the log files and having the IS as recent as the last full backup.
I find it hard to believe that we are limited to using only Full Backup - how useless is that!?
So I'm hoping for some insight - and hopefully other will learn from this example -- because I have yet to see a case like this described anywhere.
Cheers.. and thanks in advance.
Al!
Here's a real kicker for ya to chew on.
over the last 2 weeks, I've been building myself a cold redundant site for our domain in the event of a catastrophe (well.. ya never know!).
I will explain what I have done up to this point.
I have used 3 machines to do this.
1) I installed a white-box as a BDC in my current domain. Once installed, I removed it (physically) from our domain and onto it's own seperate hub, and promoted it to PDC.
2) Installed an NT 4.0 SP6 box equivalent to our Production Exchange 5.5 SP4 Server. I created Partition identical in size to that of the production server. I used the same Org and Server/Site names during the installation, and even put all the files in the same place.
3) I installed a BlackBerry server, and installed all the Add-In's in to the Exchange server.
All connectors are installed properly. All appropriate service accounts were created and given the correct rights.
At this stage, we installed Vertias Backup Exec on the Exchange server. And Sybari Antigen (these two things add files to Exchange).
I catagorized the 5 tapes that holds my last full backup, and all the incrementals.
The backups are ONLINE backups.
So.. this is how I recovered.
I used a Restore of a Full Backup of the Directory Store that was 2 weeks older than the IS full Backup. (Age of the DS is irrelevant - however I find that using an older DS restore is better)
Then I did a restore of the IS from our LAst full backup.
Once finished.. i ran eseutil -p /ispriv and eseutil -p /ispub from my large partition (I copied c:\exchsrvr\bin to my e:\drive because the repairs cache everything to a file that becomes huge... you need at least 40% of the size of your Stores in space.)
Then i tried to run the isinteg -patch. This failed, do to Jet_errBadLogFile ... so I went into my registry and deleted the:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CurrentControlSet\SERVICES\MSEXCHANGE_IS\RestoreInProgress
Ran the isinteg -patch
Deleted the Log files
And all the services started just fine.
This restore is fine upto the last full backup .. and the server is fully operational.
NOW ... when I restore the incrementals -- it pooches everything .. because, I find that i have to delete the log files in order to get the IS running again.. which is useless because, I need the log files to bring the IS up to date.
ISINTEG -PATCH will run.. it says it updates the database.. however, service will not start.
I've tried defragging the DB.
I've tried restoring the DS again to an older DS.
I've tried the repair tool.
It always comes back to deleting the log files and having the IS as recent as the last full backup.
I find it hard to believe that we are limited to using only Full Backup - how useless is that!?
So I'm hoping for some insight - and hopefully other will learn from this example -- because I have yet to see a case like this described anywhere.
Cheers.. and thanks in advance.
Al!
