Troubleshooting an Exchange Installation

If any problems arise during an Exchange installation, there are several areas you may want to investigate first. Should you run into installation problems, you should begin your troubleshooting efforts by checking the following:

Make sure that you have installed Internet Information Services (IIS) and the necessary protocol support. IIS is no longer automatically installed on a clean installation of Windows Server 2003. You will need to install IIS and the required services and components of IIS as discussed earlier in this chapter.

Make sure that you have installed Windows 2000 Service Pack 3. Installing Exchange Server 2003 on a Windows 2000 Server computer requires that Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later has been installed first. Without SP3 or later installed, the installation of Exchange Server 2003 will fail.

Determine that you have the appropriate permissions to install the software. In order to install Exchange Server 2003, you must have local Administrators permission on the server on which you want to install. In order to run the ForestPrep tool, you must be a member of the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins groups and the local Administrators group on the computer on which you run the utility. In order to run DomainPrep, you must be a member of the Domain Admins group and the local Administrators group on the computer on which you run the utility.

Verify that you have properly prepared the forest and domain. In order to install Exchange Server 2003 in all but the simplest single-domain situation, the ForestPrep tool may need to be run once in the forest, and the DomainPrep tool may need to be run in each domain in which Exchange Server 2003 will be installed.

Make sure that you have established share permissions. Make sure the necessary Exchange directories are shared if other servers are having problems connecting to the Exchange server after installation.

Observe the Exchange Server boot process for alert messages and to ensure that all necessary services have been started. If there are any problems with the Exchange server boot process, alert messages can be sent to the console and/or written to the Windows Event Log. You may also want to check that all the necessary Exchange services have been started. This can be done by going to Administrative Tools and Services or to a command prompt and executing NET START . Some Exchange services are dependent on other Windows services being started. If the dependent service is not started, the Exchange service will not start.

Use the Setup Log to determine problems that the Exchange Setup program may have logged.

While Setup is running, it creates a log of what it is attempting. This log file, called Exchange Server Setup Progress.log, is stored in the root directory of the drive on which Exchange is installed. If you run into problems during installation, the log file can help you find out what part of the installation failed or, at least, where in the installation process the failure occurred.