Email Disaster!

For my first post to my new Blog about technology in the church, I suppose it is only fitting that I should start it off by telling you about our email disaster tonight. Hopefully you can learn from it. :-)

It started off as an OK day. We just launched our 5 campus a few weeks ago and I was just trying to get back into the swing of day to day operations. I was just returning from lunch and walked into the operations offices and Wham! Several people were saying the dreaded words " Is there something wrong with the email?" which the answer is usually yes but I don't know what yet.

So, upon further inspection I realized that our Exchange Server was having a problem. The Mailbox Store had gone off-line. I tried to mount it but to no avail. So, when in doubt, restart.

After I restarted the server remotely, I waited about 10 minutes and went in to check on the server because it still hadn't come up. When I pulled it up I saw that it was still trying to shut down. So, with people getting angry about no email I manually reset it. When the Windows Logo came up, it just sat at "Applying computer Settings...". I waited about ten minutes and then started to wonder.

After searching Google For "Applying Computer Settings" and Trend Micro (our anti-virus software which I suspected) I did find a post describing the problem. So I called Trend Micro. After talking to what seamed to be a high school guy on the other end of the phone for 45 minutes I was able to manually un-install the AV software on the Exchange server.

Reboot and a new problem. A pesky pop up box complaining about "Microsoft Visual C ++ Run time Error". Each time I closed it a new one popped up a few minutes later. After completing the manual un-install of the Trend Micro, something go messed up. Turns out, I didn't finish the directions. I had to delete the actual directory of the AV software. A few more reboots and the pop-up went away.

But, now I still can't get my Mailbox Store to come up! Next step, command line and ESEutil.exe /r and no avail. Now I am restoring from last nights' backup and we will see what happens.