Author: techadmin

A very basic queue monitor

techadmin
At my office we recently needed a method to quickly know if the queues on any of the Exchange servers were building up. We have monitoring in place, but these guys can sometimes miss a build-up which leaves us with the problem.

As a very rudimentary solution, I compiled the following script.
In a nutshell, it enumerates the message count of all the queues on all Exchange servers in the Org. This includes Exchange 2003 and 2007. The script then measures the sum total of all messages. If it exceeds a predetermined amount, 1000 in my case, it will send a notification message to the administrators.

This is really a catch 22, if the server with the queue build-up is also your relay host, or happens to be the server with the problem. As a workaround for this you could probably do a NET SEND message or use 2 SMTP servers to relay the message through. An alternative is to send an SMS to administrators if you have the facility.

Initially the script waited with a while loop and polled the queues every 5 minutes. I have opted to change that, and launch the script with Task Scheduler instead, which means I don’t have to actually be logged onto the console for the script to run.

The script writes out the date and message count to a log. This log cycles daily.
I know this is very basic, but it gets the job done in terms of what we needed as an interim solution.

You can download the script here:

Updated: Exchange Mailbox Cleaner

techadmin

 I am ready to call this the final version of my Exchange Mailbox Cleaner script.

I have successfully used it in production and it saved us the effort of having to find and remove these mailboxes manually.

The GUI also makes it easy to hand this function over to the administrators for future cleanup tasks.

I have added one more search query button, the “Last Logon” button. This button will look for users on the selected server where the LastLogon is equal to $null.  This finds accounts which have essentially never logged on. There is a small bug though, if the user name is not unique, it seems that the last logon is unreadable and the account will also show up in the list.

This will however report an ERROR to the shell screen. Mailboxes which have not logged on will report the following warning to the shell:

WARNING: There is no data to return for the specified mailbox ‘Bunny, Bugs’, because it has not been logged on to.

For now, this is a manual method of verifying that the correct mailboxes will be removed. I am however looking for a way to avoid this and will post an update as soon as I have time to find the solution.

I have also permanently removed the Add-ADPermission from the Export-Mailbox section, as full mailbox access permissions are enough to export the mailbox.

I may build in a check later to see if the permissions are required before adding them. 

#Add-ADPermission -Identity $actionItem -User $currentUser -Extendedrights "Send As" -whatif 
#Add-ADPermission -Identity $actionItem -User $currentUser -Extendedrights "Receive As" -whatif

As always, any comments / suggestions with regards to the script are always welcome.

A little disclaimer / warning: This is a dangerous utility, and can wreck your Exchange system if you are not careful. Please test this in your test environment first, and adhere to your change control procedures before using this utility in the live environment. I take absolutely no responsibility for any damage caused by using this tool.

The utility requires the Exchange Management shell, and if launched from a Vista / Windows 7 needs to be “Run as Administrator”

This script was tested under Windows 7 Powershell v2 The script can be downloaded from here:

Maximize My SendSize

techadmin

Someone asked me the other day, “How could I go about using Security Groups, to control users’ send size limits?” He basically had a limit of 2mb for all users, and wanted to allow users in a specific Security Group to send up to 50mb messages. Here is a basic breakdown of the process I suggested: Firstly, you need to confirm that the global transport limit is raised to 50mb.

You can view and set these limits using get-transportconfig and set-transportconfig respectively:

Get-TransportConfig | select MaxSendSize 

The next step would involve setting the send connector to allow 50mb messages. You can use get-sendconnector to get a list of all send connectors, and their respective limits.

Get-SendConnector | Select Name, MaxMessageSize  

And then use set-sendconnector to set the MaxSendSize Set-SendConnector “Connector Name” –MaxSendSize 50mb Finally, you need to control the individual users’ send limits. If you have to control it via groups, you can use the following command to first enumerate the users in the group, and then pipe that to the set-mailbox command. Replace testsizegroup with the group you need to control the size limits for.

((get-group "testsizegroup").members) | foreach {set-mailbox -identity $_.Name -maxsendsize 52428800}

This will set the MaxSendSize for all users in that group to 50 mb. This command will have to be rerun every time to add users to the group, so it would be advisable to schedule this command to run hourly / daily etc.