Mattias Holm

Today I got a request to export mailbox sizes from our exchange server, of course there is no obvious way to do that from the GUI..

So running the following gives you a csv file with displayname, itemcount and mailbox size in MB

get-mailbox |get-mailboxstatistics |select-object displayname, itemcount, @{expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}} |export-csv 'C:\Documents and Settings\administrator.AD\Desktop\exchange users.csv'

One day I decided that I needed to replace the old "server" I use at home for various tasks, I ended up with a new shiny i7 system, enough gigs of RAM and loads of storage. Beeing sort of a geek and most of all "root" I kinda had to run VMWare ESXi on that box, after fighting ESXi with every NIC I could find laying around the appartment I finally found one that was accepted, some old Intel 1000pro card. Anyway, back to the point.

To be able to export a users mailbox including Inbox, Deleted Items, Drafts, Junk E-Mail, Outbox, Sent Items, Journal, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks to a PST file you need to have a 32bit OS with exchange management tools and outlook (2003 and up) installed the computer also needs to be a member of the domain where the exchange server is located. 

To export the mailbox simply run Export-Mailbox -Identity user@domain.tld -PSTFolderPath c:\mailbox.pst from the exchange management shell which needs to be run as administrator.

I use this to test various virus scanner installations it is completely harmless but triggers the scanner. You might want to disable your virus scanner before trying to download the attached file.

First of all a few words on this project, the documentation on the modules where there is anything that could even qualify as documentation is quite bad, there are confusing project pages were some projects have tar balls and some where you need to use svn to download, some repositories were offline, to top that the tomcat that is delivered with at least CentOs5.2 is incompatible with mysql.

From what I have found the ASA 5505 has no good way to set up split tunneling for a specific client connection if you don't want to allow the user to have split tunneling every where, cisco keeps telling me that the ASA 5505 is able to do everything that the old Cisco VPN Concentrator 3000 could do but clearly that is not the case :)

Server side rules size limits and exchange has been a pain over the years but starting with Exchange 2007 you are able to set the rules size limit to 256kb which is more than enough for a normal user, It took me a while to find out how to increase the size so, to save you some time these are the command you need.

To set the rules quota to 256kb for the user dummy run
[PS] C:\>get-mailbox dummy|set-mailbox -rulesquota 256kb

This was a bit tricky, getting free/busy data from he exchange server just did not work, using OWA or connecting without RPC gave me the free/busy data just as expected but when connecting over RPC outlook kept telling me that "free/busy information cound not be retrieved".
Lokking at the autodiscover settings I found that the only Availability service address being published was the internal one wich of course was the cause of my problems, so anyway solution below.

This requires some basic knowledge of IPSEC and the ASA5505 this also requires modifying the DefaultL2LGroup on the ASA so if thats not an option stop reading now.

Network settings:
Office LAN: 192.168.1.0
Remote office LAN: 192.168.200.0
 

I spent way to much time(again) trying to figure out what was wrong when my GRT backups just before completion it kept failing with 'E00084AF - The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed.', by clicking the attaced link in the error message I was able to learn that this problem was caused by the advanced open filesystem trying to read/write something.