Thursday, September 18, 2008

Installing Exchange Server 2007

Thursday evening usually means less work do to. Most of the time all i have to do is go home and get some sleep but not this Thursday evening. Around 12pm when i got to work i met a sys Ad struggling with getting back an exchange server online that crashed. He needed this working so urgently because the boss will be at the office the following morning from Nigeria and will be expecting everything to be running smoothly on his network especially the exchange server where he does most of his transactions. So i decided to help.

Dang!! We tried so hard to restore the exchange server but to no avail. We later realized that the server running the exchange server has three roles of the FSMO:
  1. PDC (primary Domain Controller )
  2. Infrastructure Master
  3. Schema master
We had to seize all these roles of the FSMO and distributed them to different servers by following the steps we got from this link

After transferring the FSMO we were still seeing the offline DC (Domain Controller) on the Active Directory and it has to be deleted. Got the instructions from this link as well.

Finally we decided to install exchange server 2007 but it was giving us this error
Error:
One or more servers in the existing organization is running Exchange Server 2003 without Service Pack 2 (or later). Installation cannot proceed until existing Exchange Server 2003 computers are upgraded to Service Pack 2.


We had no exchange installed at this point. All exchange servers were uninstalled from the network. We went through almost all the servers on the networking hoping to find somewhere an exchange server we forgot to uninstall but none was found. Pretty confused we decided to take a 5 minutes break, ate some food and drank some apple juice and got back to work. This is how we solved the error:
  1. went run and type adsiedit.msc
  2. went to configuration-> services and deleted the exchange folder
  3. went to and deleted the exchange folder
  4. restarted server
Everything was normal. We updated the .Net Framework and followed the installation instructions

So far so good.
I will tell you more about the configuration part of the exchange server later.

1 comment:

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