Exchange Problems - Slow Emails

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 08:37

OK, firstly I gotta say I'm NO IT Technician, so if what I say is in crap technical terms then I apologise.

I'm on contract for a company where the IT Technician walked out before Christmas, as well as my day to day programming the company would like me to perform day to day IT tasks.

Had this problem since last Thursday and could really do with some pointers as to where to look as it's just totally alien to me!!

We needed to reset the email service (Exchange 2000).

When it came back up, it said the Public Folders was too big and needed defragging. The filesize was over 15Gb and I've seen on the net this is the limit. So defragged it, attached it, and it's working.

But since it's come back up, internal email sent from A to B is taking anything between 30mins to an hour to reach the recipient!

There's something called "Trend ScanMail Real-time Scan Monitor" which I can see my message on the little console but that's it!

Is there anything I can test/do to see where the problem may be, some kind of diagnosis or something that I need to check?

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 08:54

External emails are the same, just take an age to go out and receive.

There's 2.5Mb (yep MB) on the root drive, but 25Gb on the Data drive where all the Exchange Logs are kept.

So I'd imagine there's something not right on the root, but don't know where to start 'cleaning' stuff seeing as all the Logs are on the D:

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 09:04

Well they've assured me that the IT guy before me use to clean up space on the C:, but they don't know what he did, so I've no idea where to look.

There's a D:\ExchSrvr\Logs which has loads of 5Mb files that need clearing down quite often, but can't see what files wouldn't be needed on the C:.

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 09:09

Cheers folks, it's a nightmare, programming I can do in my sleep but show me a server and I freeze!! lol

Right, wish me luck, I'm going in.....

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 09:12

sorry, just to confirm:

I'm ok to delete all the directories and files in the WINNT folder that start $NTUninstall?

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 09:53

Cheer PR.

To be honest, the company will be going through a MAJOR overhaul in 5 weeks, but until then we're obliged under contract to have the equipment as is. It's about 6 year old, the Exchange server has 2 Pentium III's with 1Gb of memory, a 40Gb Harddrive with a 10Gb system partition and a 30Gb data partition, so it's quite old and is constantly going down.

We only found out a few week ago that there have been NO backups since October 2007, and Backup Exec just fails to run.

As you say, it's been a daily battle and someone like myself who has little IT technician/networking experience, it's been a huge baptism of fire trying to delete log files, clean spam, making sure the services are running correctly, etc, etc.

I've now managed to get 230Mb on the C:, I'd imagine the effects of this will probably take a few hours to see. Emails that I sent at 8am haven't come through yet, but one I sent 5mins ago has just come through so something seems to be working somewhere.

But thanks again to everyone for the tips, been VERY helpful.

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 13:42

The BackupExec error just says "Failed to Start"

Dunno what the hell you can do with that to be honest!

I've checked the EventLog but it just shows an error code of 0 which is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard!

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 16:10

It's version 8.60

The services are running, but the event log just fires the error every time you try and run it.

~J~ · 25 Mar 2008 at 16:39

The problem is oddjob62, we can't do a backup 'cos it simply doesn't work. Believe me, I'm no expert at all so gonna trust you on this, but we had a company in a while ago and they advised us to delete the log files as they weren't needed!

As for the Exchange Server settings, I can't open that because it either says "Disc Full" or "MMC Cannot open the selected file."

Since this morning, I've had to clear the event log files 5 times as it just says they are full.

As an example of the sheer magnitude of the problem, we've had this on going since January when I started the contract, but over the Easter break it's just ground to a halt (probably 'cos I haven't been on hand to keep things in trim!).

Today, I've deleted nearly 500Mb of Uninstall directories, temporary files, and I'm literally watching the server take that 500Mb down to about 1.3Mb, then upto 28Mb, then down to 2Mb, etc, etc.

Absolute hell here, just can't wait for the new server to arrive in a few weeks time so things can be migrated over.

The server has been running (or rather had been) for a total of 812 days before we HAD to restart it last week as the people who we're renewing the contract with needed to do something, since then it's been hell!!

*ang on*

Exchange has now worked; details are:

The mailboxes (Private and Public) are stored on the D:, which has about 120Gb free.