I have been setting up Exchange Server 2007 for a client this weekend. Everything has been proceeding fairly smoothly, until I tried to test out Outlook Web Access. When going to the server from my browser, I would receive a “Service Unavailable” message.

Event Log gave much more information, thankfully:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W3SVC-WP
Event Category: None
Event ID: 2274
Date: 3/2/2008
Time: 3:18:41 PM
User: N/A
Computer: xxxxxxxxxx
Description:
ISAPI Filter ‘c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\\aspnet_filter.dll’ could not be loaded due to a configuration problem. The current configuration only supports loading images built for a AMD64 processor architecture. The data field contains the error number. To learn more about this issue, including how to troubleshooting this kind of processor architecture mismatch error, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=29349.

The link didn’t help at all. Searching for “W3SVC-WP 2274″ on Microsoft’s support site also didn’t help. Thankfully, Google saves the day.

The fix is quite simple. Follow the directions in this link and OWA should start to work properly again.

Update:  This is a known issue when Blackberry Enterprise Server is installed on the same box.  See this link.

Microsoft’s recently released KB934525 (SharePoint 3.0 security update) installed with other updates on one of our sites this past weekend. Of course, it caused nothing but problems. Also of course, the client uses SharePoint 3.0 has a critical business tool.

I was informed of the problem this morning. After some searching of the Internet, I discovered that many people are having problems with this update.

Part of the problem is that there are necessary post-installation processes that need to run on the server. If you don’t, your configuration and content databases are not updated and SharePoint simply doesn’t work right.

My troubleshooting steps should not be taken as a real process, as some things seemed to work by magic. I didn’t even sacrifice a chicken – magic without poultry (or a reasonable facsimile) always bothers me. (more…)

With Microsoft Exchange service pack 2, Microsoft has included IMF (Intelligent Mail Filtering) to help combat the legions of SPAM that plague our poor inboxes.  With this free tool, you’re getting what you pay for.  It’s simplistic and lacks many features that I would consider critical to a spam filtering solution (whitelisting, anyone??).  But it’s free, right?

(more…)

On Tuesday I spent the day at TNX: Exchange. TNX: Exchange was a full day event, hosted by Microsoft Technet, about their messaging applications and mobile workforce tools.

They covered some interesting areas – including using Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal, Exchange 2003 (and SP2), Windows Mobile 5 and Live Communication Server. (more…)

On Monday afternoon, the building one of my clients is in lost power. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Their UPS would tell their servers to shut down, and all would be good. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Their UPS failed, and their Windows 2003 Small Business Server shut down in a rather dirty fashion.

Once power was restored, I managed to get into the machine and see what kind of damage was done. Normally, I wouldn’t have worried at all – but this client seems to have the worst luck when it comes to systems.

My worries were well proven. Exchange couldn’t mount the private message store. Some quick digging with ESEUtil showed that the store had shut down dirty (which it should have recovered from), but was missing one of the transaction log files.

Bad news. With that log file missing, it’s pretty unlikely to get the store mounted without some data loss. (more…)