I have failed...Exchange > me

Well after 3 years of being a SysAdmin, I finally had to admit defeat and call Microsoft for tech support. I can't believe how mad I actually am over all of this. I never thought I'd see the day when the internet couldn't provide me with a path to a solution. After 20 hours of attempted solutions this weekend, I had to whip out the Software Assurance contract and use up our "one free incident".

I'm only writing this to clear my head of it and move on. My brain literally hurts.

Background.
Exchange 5.5 Store rolled to 2K, then rolled to 2K3 SP2 on different box over the past 5 years. So teh stores themselves are that old, just upgraded.
SOMEWHERE in all these moves the EFORMS REGISTRY folder (public folder, right click, show system folders) has lost it's DACL. I can't modify the permissions.

The ONLY thing I had to do with our new VoIP rollover was to place a custom .OFT form in the Organizational Forms Library so people could listen to their voicemails through Outlook.

Well I kept getting access denied when attempting publish. Then the Org forms page wouldn't even load because of access denied. Turns out IIS controls the permissions for the EXADMIN Virtual Directory and was trying to authenticate via SSL even though I had it turned off on that directory. Our deafult website houses OWA, EXADMIN, and another special site for Board members only. Naturally I needed to keep SSL enabled for OWA's sake. I got around that and thought I was on the right track, but the facking EFORMS REGISTRY key still listed the DACL as "anonymous missing". I used a KILLER tool called PfDavmin to check my public folder rights. If you're an Admin, GET THIS program. At least it confirmed my suspicions. The true irony is that EVERY SINGLE folder, system public, has a good DACL except for the EFORMS REGISTRY. Too bad that is the ONLY place I can stick this .OFT file to get people's voicemail working. The permissions are corrupt, and I can;t back them out. Even had the CTO get teh master domain admin account password out of the safe so I could try changing the permissions with that. HAHAHA, no dice

So I can't wait to see what the MS Exchange Guru that should be calling me today will do. I hope it's something rediculous, because if it's a checkbox I'm going to kill myself.

Thanks for listening gang...

Anytime

Yeah, lets hope its not a little check box hidden somewhere, but you never know

$10 says when the Microsoft tech guy calls back, first thing he'll say, in a heavy accent, will be "Hab you tried rebootink?"

Heh we should make a thread. Should be called : Let the frustration out. Or stupid customers/reps on the phone if you work in a support center.


I think I will make this now.


heh did the microsofty guy speak any engrish?

mozes said:

Heh we should make a thread. Should be called : Let the frustration out. Or stupid customers/reps on the phone if you work in a support center.


I think I will make this now.

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LoL, Great Idea

High-end support people know their stuff. They may still have a funny accent, but few times have I had to resort to MS support for 2003 Server issues or Exchange and they always help you out.

I think I even helped MS discover few bugs and I believe I am the cause for one their knowledgebase articles dealing with MrxSmb problems, lol

There is only so much you can dig up and so many places you can check things in, the permission problem would have been very hard to diagnose not to mention fix and when you're spending 100 hours on it, it's a lot cheaper for a company to pay for a support call (even if you don't want to and feel like a 'tard while doing it). Company's best interest needs to be top priority.

What's your longest support call? Mine is the MrxSmb issue on a NAS device that I don't want to describe at the moment, it would take few pages, but overall it took over 6 months of logging , testing & patching to resolve it and both HP and MS support people were excellent and very helpful.

zrac said:

High-end support people know their stuff. They may still have a funny accent, but few times have I had to resort to MS support for 2003 Server issues or Exchange and they always help you out.

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//Agrees

Three times I've called for Small Biz Server stuff...and they're awesome. Once was a little frustrating at first...but the other two times..both appeared to me to be peeps in the States..no accent.

First time was a biggie..over a file permissions issue early on with SBS2K and an older VFoxPro database after re-indexing it nightly. Later discovered to be common in 2K server. I got bumped up to upper left database engineers on this one. They wrote a custom program to reset permissions..and the software vender of this medical product incorporated it into their re-indexing (back then..they're on SQL now)

Second time over shared modem service..

Third time over a POP3 connector server for Exchange.

I actually look forward to times when I'll have to call them...always interesting.

SVT4ME said:

Well after 3 years of being a SysAdmin, I finally had to admit defeat and call Microsoft for tech support.

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I can't believe you went 3 years without calling them If it takes me more than 8 hours to solve a problem, I have no trouble justifying the $255 for a live call.

YeOldeStonecat said:

//Agrees

Three times I've called for Small Biz Server stuff...and they're awesome.

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The SBS support definitely declined in quality when it moved to India. They do solve the problem, but there's much tooo much of "please hold while I research this issue..."

When I dealt with the group in Charlotte, you could count on getting a very well qualified individual that could quickly solve your problem.

Every time I've ever dealt with PSS I've been more than satisfied. I've had to call for an exchange issue once in the past. The support rep worked through the whole problem over the course of many hours/days. They know exactly what they're doing. When a problem involves far too much time and can't be resolved by googling/community help, I don't shy away from starting a PSS case (but that only happens once a year, maybe). Even if it isn't free, I consider it money well spent.

In the past 7 years, I have had to call Microsoft a total of 3 times. Once on our old Proxy Server. This call was refunded to us, and we had no charges. The proxy server died, the advice was to rebuild the proxy server from scratch.

The next two times were within the same weekend. Our SharePoint server was acting strange. We ended up losing keyboard and mouse on the server. VNC wouldn't let me connect. I talked with Microsoft and the only thing we could do was rebuild the OS. No biggie, I also changed the partitions on the server, and ran into an issue with SharePoint's restore of the database. Prior to blowing the server away I backed up the SharePoint DB twice, on two different back up servers. The restore process had some issues. Not the backup, but the restore. SharePoint dumped all the info back into the DB, but didn't associate it so people could access the data. Microsoft had an acutal tool to fix this type of issue. Unfortunatly I ended up working 36 hours in the coarse of a Saturday & Sunday, but no one noticed a thing come Monday Morning.

The guy I talked to at SharePoint Support was calling me from his home phone, and was really helpful. The guy I talked to about the keyboard issue was in India, however with his accent I thought it was from the Southern US. Both knew what they were doing, and were very helpful.

I have gotten down to where I don't care where my support is coming from, as long as they know what they are doing and are helpful. I have talked to tech support in England, Germany, South Africa, India, Thiland, Canada, and all over the US. I sometimes have more issues with Southern US accents than I do with some forigen accents.

The only other time I called, I was on the phone for 14 hours straight, and talked to 3 people. The Exchange consultant I bought in to migrate us from 5.5 to 2000, ran into an issue he couldn't solve, and had never seen. The first guy from England was useless, and even more so in the last hour prior to him going off shift. The second guy from South Carolina was worse. We suggested a Remote Desktop session so he could see what was going on with the server. The guy wouldn't do it. We were on the phone with this jackass for 8 hours, he handed us off to a guy in Texas, and we suggested the WebEx/Remote Desktop session right off, he asked hasn't anyone else done this yet? He had our issue fixed in 2 hours.

I agree, heh I been doing it for the last 4 years, doing support for MS, then went to lvl 2 for layer 2 products (cisco and sonicwall), and currently now a lvl 3 for a credit card processing company. Let me tell ya this crap isnt easy. Dealing with peoples network security issues that deal with millions of dollars of transactions a day. Heh im actually taking a call while im doing this. Think of looking at what they see over the phone. There are not very many bright people out there. But every once in a while a good one comes by and takes time to figure it out. But its decent money and good benefits, I miss hands on but most places dont have these. I can play my DSlite and PSP while taking calls, surf the internet. blah blah blah

I had to call for the first time 2 months ago. The guys I talked to were really helpful but after days of being on the phone with all of them their advice was it was an error I could ignore. We created a new forest with a new domain and then added several child domains and every time a DC in a child domain would boot up, we'd get logged events of not being able to find a GC. It would get the addresses fine but wouldn't see them and then finally error out. Then 9 seconds later, all errors would clear and everything was fine. Wasn't an issue with Server 2003 RTM but only occured with 2003 SP1 and R2. Their advice, ignore it, or tie DNS as a dependency to Net Logon to slow it down.

mozes said:

I agree, heh I been doing it for the last 4 years, doing support for MS, then went to lvl 2 for layer 2 products (cisco and sonicwall), and currently now a lvl 3 for a credit card processing company. Let me tell ya this crap isnt easy. Dealing with peoples network security issues that deal with millions of dollars of transactions a day. Heh im actually taking a call while im doing this. Think of looking at what they see over the phone. There are not very many bright people out there. But every once in a while a good one comes by and takes time to figure it out. But its decent money and good benefits, I miss hands on but most places dont have these. I can play my DSlite and PSP while taking calls, surf the internet. blah blah blah

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so you're the ahole that lets me sit on hold for 20 minutes while you research my issue futher...

Well it's now been 3 hours and 10 minutes on this call. I have TWO Engineers working on it. Not sure they're engineers considering all they've had me do is follow the same KB's I already found, and keep pausing to "research further"

Fint said:

$10 says when the Microsoft tech guy calls back, first thing he'll say, in a heavy accent, will be "Hab you tried rebootink?"

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Not with a premier account. It's outstanding. If they can't solve the problem over the phone in a reasonable amount of time (depending on production severity), they get on a plane and are on site in 4 hours or less. Never been faced with that scenario before. Called a few times. never spoken to anyone outside of the US, and don't expect I will in the forseeable future. At least the premier support has a knowledge base that the public is no aware of or has access too. It's the KB on steroids. Don't know if the level 1, SBS support/etc... has access. I would assume they do.

I can't imagine what the contract costs but it's been an extrememly useful resource. Outsourcing for the "regular" users I suppose is inevitable. For large corporate accounts that don't mind paying the premier price for the resource, that resource is excellent. So far anyway.