11.10 ExchDump

 < Day Day Up > 



Administrators and system designers have always had an issue with documenting Exchange servers. Microsoft PSS have exactly the same issue, because it is very difficult for them to help customers solve problems if they do not know the details of server configurations. Moreover, on the phone, people occasionally omit essential details. Having a utility to dump and report on the essential settings and other information about an Exchange server is incredibly useful. The only sad thing is that it has taken Microsoft so long to provide such a tool. Perhaps this was by design, to leave a gap for companies such as Ecora, with their Configuration Auditor for Exchange,[4] to exploit. However, when you think about it, a fundamental part of good system management practice is to know what configuration your servers run all the time. Fortunately, the situation is improved in Exchange 2003, because Microsoft has created the ExchDump tool, which you can download from its Web site (the description supplied here is based on prerelease software). Microsoft released an earlier version of the program, called ExchUtil, for Exchange 2000, but this never became general knowledge, so it is a hidden gem!

11.10.1 Running ExchDump

To run ExchDump, open a command window, navigate to the exchsrvr\bin directory, and type in the program name together with the command switches you want to use. ExchDump extracts information from both the IIS metabase and the Exchange configuration container in the AD, as appropriate. Table 11.7 lists the full set of command-line switches.

Table 11.7: ExchDump Command-Line Switches

Switch

Meaning

Runs: IPCONFIG and/or NETSTAT

/HTTP

Dumps configuration information about HTTP and Outlook Web Access, such as the Default Web Site and the Exchange virtual server.

IPCONFIG

/SMTP

Dumps SMTP configuration information, such as the log directory and authentication settings.

Neither

/RPC

Lists RPC connection information to Exchange components, such as the Store, System Attendant, and MTA.

Both

/SERVER

Reports information about the server, including details of the Stores and the accounts that hold permissions for various operations (such as log on locally).

Neither

/RG

Dumps information about routing groups. The WinRoute utility provides better information through a good GUI.

Neither

/RP

Dumps details of recipient policies, including the policies for default address generation.

Neither

/AL

Dumps the contents of the Address List Container to show all of the address lists (including the LDAP search criteria for each). Also dumps details of the Recipient Update Service (RUS) showing how many RUS run inside the organization and the servers that host each RUS.

Neither

/FH

Dumps details of the public folder hierarchies used inside the organization.

Neither

/CA

Dumps details of the Active Directory Connector agreements. Only present when the ADC synchronizes the Exchange 5.5 DS with the AD.

Neither

/ALL

Dumps all of the above information.

Both

/IM

Dumps information about the Exchange-specific version (if deployed) of Instant Messaging.

Neither

/HOSTING

Dumps a mixture of information that Microsoft has identified as typical of a hosted Exchange environment, including SMTP and HTTP data, address lists, and so on.

IPCONFIG

/USER

Dumps details of a single user object, which you identify with either its login name (e.g., /user:Redmond) or its UPN (e.g., /USER:Tony.Redmond@hp.com). If the user name is ambiguous, ExchDump reports the first match.

Neither

/GUID

Dumps a single AD object identified by its GUID, which can be expressed in either a binary string or GUID string format.

Neither

/DN

Dumps a single AD object identified by its distinguished name (e.g., /DN:"cn=Redmond,ou=Test,dc=hpqnet,dc=net). Uses the /V switch to report details of child objects.

Neither

/REMOTE

By default, ExchDump connects to the local server and queries the local metabase and the AD from that server. Uses the /REMOTE switch to connect to another Exchange 2003 server in the same organization and generates dumps for its data.

N/A

/NOACL

Disables reporting of ACL information. ExchDump sometimes is unable to report on an object because it cannot dump its ACL. You may be able to work around the problem by specifying this switch.

N/A

/APPEND

The default is to always overwrite existing output files. Use this switch to append instead.

N/A

/V

Generate verbose information.

-

Note that if you run ExchDump on a cluster, the program will prompt you for the name of one of the virtual servers in the cluster from which to fetch configuration data.

During processing, ExchDump generates two files:

  • Summary_server.htm (Figure 11.55). This file is useful because it contains a lot of information divided into sections that you can expand to see more information.

    click to expand
    Figure 11.55: HTML summary output from ExchDump.

  • Full_server.txt (Figure 11.56). This file contains more information, but it is not formatted as well and the information is harder to interpret. However, it is very useful to support engineers.

    click to expand
    Figure 11.56: Full-text report from ExchDump.

The summary report describes information such as the version of Windows, the build level, the hot fixes applied to the server, the version of Exchange, and so on. Afterward, the data reported varies with the command- line switch that you specify. The reports generated with the /ALL switch are the most comprehensive-you will see details about policies; recipient update services; connectors; protocol settings such as SMTP, HTTP, and RPC; details about OWA configuration; TCP/IP settings (IPCONFIG) for the server; and current network connections (NETSTAT -AN).

On a server in a small organization, running a complete dump configuration (using the /ALL switch, illustrated in Figure 11.57), takes less than a minute. However, running the same command in a large organization, such as HP's, where the AD is huge and there are hundreds of servers in the organization, takes much longer, largely because it takes longer to resolve ACLs on all of the objects the program examines. ExchDump required six minutes to process a /ALL dump for an Exchange 2003 server in HP's production environment, while the equivalent in a smaller organization took less than a minute.

click to expand
Figure 11.57: Running ExchDump.

You can reduce the time required to run the program slightly by specifying the /NOACL switch. This also has the effect of reducing the size of the ExchDump reports. Table 11.8 compares the execution time and report sizes for both a large and small Exchange organization. With the /NOACL switch, the size of the summary report in the large organization dropped to 1,759 KB.

Table 11.8: Time Taken to Run ExchDump
 

Large Exchange Organization

Small Exchange Organization

Number of servers

147

8

Time required

6 minutes

>1 minute

Size of summary HTM file

2,991 KB

5,461 KB

Size of full TXT file

2,351 KB

5,024 KB

ExchDump does not produce pretty reports, and there is no doubt that you can find third-party products that will generate more information presented in a more readable fashion. Third-party products will probably offer more features, such as integration into a management framework, but you will have to pay for them. The big value of ExchDump is that it is available on every Exchange 2003 server, so there is no excuse for not documenting server configurations in the future. In addition, ExchDump is a superb support tool, which will help to improve communications between system administrators and Microsoft PSS.

[4] . http://www.ecora.com/ecora/products/exchange/auditor.asp.



 < Day Day Up > 



Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrators Pocket Consultant
ISBN: 0735619786
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net