From: Sei on
Is there a way to disconnect the mailbox forcefully?

Our situation is as follows:

We had 3 DCs in our forest. Let them be A, B and C. "C" had to be demoted and a new DC, "D" was installed. The old DC i.e. "C" had to demoted forcefully and the end result was not pretty. There were entries all over the AD. Somehow we managed to remove all the entries from the AD by cleaning up the metadata and manual deletion.

Temporarily a new DC "E" was created and the 6 users previously under "C" were added to it. Their mailboxes got added in the Exchange as well. Now DC "E" is facing some issues and is not being able to communicate with any other DC nor is anyone being able to contact it.

The Exchange server mailboxes have also suffered as a result and whenever we try to disable the mailbox under "E", it throws up an error that the DC cannot be contacted.

Is there anyway that I can shift the users from failed DC "E" to the new DC "D" ?? The mailboxes are pretty important. Or if there is any other solution to the problem, that is welcome as well!


Submitted via EggHeadCafe - Software Developer Portal of Choice
Simple DataSet for Paging Instead of ObjectDataSource
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/2a487d1a-c83b-4069-8366-fa65ecaa52a0/simple-dataset-for-paging.aspx
From: Mark Arnold [MVP] on
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:17:33 -0800, Sei Kal wrote:

>Is there a way to disconnect the mailbox forcefully?
>
>Our situation is as follows:
>
>We had 3 DCs in our forest. Let them be A, B and C. "C" had to be demoted and a new DC, "D" was installed. The old DC i.e. "C" had to demoted forcefully and the end result was not pretty. There were entries all over the AD. Somehow we managed to remove all the entries from the AD by cleaning up the metadata and manual deletion.
>
>Temporarily a new DC "E" was created and the 6 users previously under "C" were added to it. Their mailboxes got added in the Exchange as well. Now DC "E" is facing some issues and is not being able to communicate with any other DC nor is anyone being able to contact it.
>
>The Exchange server mailboxes have also suffered as a result and whenever we try to disable the mailbox under "E", it throws up an error that the DC cannot be contacted.
>
>Is there anyway that I can shift the users from failed DC "E" to the new DC "D" ?? The mailboxes are pretty important. Or if there is any other solution to the problem, that is welcome as well!
>
>
>Submitted via EggHeadCafe - Software Developer Portal of Choice
>Simple DataSet for Paging Instead of ObjectDataSource
>http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/2a487d1a-c83b-4069-8366-fa65ecaa52a0/simple-dataset-for-paging.aspx

This doesn't make a lot of sense right now. All the DCs should be in
sync. A particular DC doesn't have records for some accounts/mailboxes
and not others.
What you need to do is to stop touching Exchange. You need to go and
get your DCs synching properly. Still ignore Exchange. When you're
sure your DCs are in good shape you will then go and look at Exchange.
You won't touch any mailbox information though. You will make sure
that the Exchange is looking at the right DCs and any information you
know is correct in Exchange (such as where a mailbox is) is reflected
in AD. You then create something fresh on the Exchange server and wait
for all the DCs to show that record, properly. Then change something
and do the same again.
Final step is to find the inevitable disconnected mailboxes and link
them to the orphaned accounts. etc.
At the moment you're playing with the wrong system.