Robert Chipperfield's Page

Continuing on a theme of how to fix those niggly little problems in Exchange Server, today it's the turn of this error when starting Outlook:

The cause? An SSL certificate that expired some time last year - the default Exchange self-signed certificate seems to have a default validity of a year, after which you get the warning above when starting Outlook.

The solution…

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With dozens of virtual servers on tens of virtual test networks here in the Exchange division, all getting hammered quite a bit with Naughty Things that Probably Shouldn't Be Done, we tend to break things quite regularly.



One of the more common failures is Outlook Web Access under Exchange Server 2007. One way or another, it just stops working - sometimes in a minor way, sometimes more extensively. This morning, it simply presented me with a blank page after login.



Part of a… Continue

My desktop here at work is a rather nice Windows 7 machine - quad core, 8GB, SSD drive (thanks Red Gate!). It's only a few months old, so I was rather shocked to arrive at work this morning to the old friend: a Blue Screen of Death!



A quick reboot, and it seemed fine, but soon after, another crash, then a third after that. Not best pleased at this point, I wandered over to our IS guys to see if they had any ideas. Windows Updates were called into question, but turned up nothing. Then… Continue

Yesterday I was speaking to a potential customer who was interested in how email archiving could be integrated with their Exchange replication technology. Which got me thinking...



How do you trade off potential data loss against extended downtime in a replicated / clustered environment?



Simplifying hugely, there's two ways you can handle this: you can either replicate data instantly, and not report that an action is complete until all replicas are consistent, or you do it… Continue

At the moment, I'm working in Red Gate's Exchange Server Archiver team. One of the great things about the way we work is that I sit just across from Scott, who's one of our sales guys, so as a developer I get to hear what customers and potential customers are asking about, what they wish we did, and what they love.



Something that came up this afternoon was a question about recovery of archived messages in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Exchange environment (think: no… Continue