I’ve spent this week working with a consultant on moving to a Win 2k AD environment. As if that wasn’t enough of a task we decided to add our Exchange 2000 upgrade to the mix. There is nothing like tempting fate and making error correction more tricky. The plan was to do all this with a goal of near zero downtime for all users. What was I thinking?
The AD upgrade was smooth. I’ve got a learning curve for management functions but it should be pretty gently. I’ve already learned a lot of it in preparation for the move and while the tools are new the basic concepts are the same as always. Now it’s just going to be a mater of doing everything a few times until it sticks.
The Exchange piece on the other hand has been a pain. I’ve had a week of early morning and late nights and I still have little quirks that I will have to work out on Monday.
I can’t really complain for the extra ability I will gain with Exchange 2k and AD I will save time in the long run.
I just get frustrated when the upgrades themselves go very smoothly and then for a week I have these little crappy thing popping up.
My first bug surprise was when the Outlook Web Access (OWA) refused to work for non-administrative users. Turns out that when Exchange loads the OWA web site it assumes that there are default permissions on the drive. Well I don’t do that. One of my first moves after formatting my data drive(s) is to remove all access except for administrative users. I finally found the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article that explained the proper permissions for web site. It’s one thing to theorize that you have a drive permissions problem. It’s another to actually figure out what the proper permissions are and which directory needs them.
Now I’m getting various machines that for some reason just didn’t completely make the transition from the old mail server to the new one. So they are slow to do anything but they do connect to the new server. In the case I have experimented with it seems that simply removing the Exchange profile and putting it back fixes everything but why? Microsoft support offered no advice. Google Groups was my savior on this one. I’ll find out Monday if this works for everyone or just the one person working late enough to get the fix Friday.
I guess I really should not complain wit h just two fairly minor quirks that caused any significant outages. I guess I just like it better when it all looks like magic to the end users so they have no idea that anything major is happening.
You win some you lose some and with any luck sometime Monday or Tuesday I can get back to normal and start catching up with the various little administrative tasks that could wait until I was done with the upgrade and upgrade debugging.
Then the next week after I am sure I have a stable implementation I will start making changed to Group Policy. I have some experience with this in the NT and 9x client world but I am excited about playing with the new Windows 2k version. At first glance it looks as if Microsoft finally got it right.
With any luck I should have just one more year of upgrades and I will have all clients that Windows 2k/XP. But that is a different upgrade.
Dreams.
(original date 2002 or 2003)