Thursday 18 April 2024

Disable the First things First popup in office 2013

To disable the following message in office 2013. You may do the following registry changes.


[Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Registration]
“AcceptAllEulas”=dword:00000001


 



To disable the following message in office 2013. You may do the following registry changes.



[Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\General]
“OptInDisable”=dword:00000001


Thursday 19 October 2023

How to change Microsoft Exchange services startup type to automatic and start the services

 Issue:

There are some security patches of Microsoft exchange server which change the startup type of exchange services to disable from automatic, Due to which these services would not auto start after deploying the patches.  changing the startup type of these services may be time consuming and the better option would be to use the following command in exchange PowerShell. 



Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -like "Microsoft Exchange *" } | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic

Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -eq "IIS Admin Service" } | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic

Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -eq "Microsoft Filtering Management Service" } | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic

Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -eq "World Wide Web Publishing Service" } | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic

Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -like "Microsoft Exchange *" } | Start-Service

Get-Service | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName –eq “IIS Admin Service” } | Start-Service

Friday 29 September 2023

Resolved: This computer is a member of a database availability group (DAG). It must be removed from the DAG before you can uninstall Exchange.

Issue detail:

Was trying to decommission Exchange 2019, but was getting the following error.


 "Error:

This computer is a member of a database availability group (DAG). It must be removed from the DAG before you can uninstall Exchange."


Resolution:

From role and feature, remove the failover cluster feature and reboot the system and then try again to start the uninstall from control panel/uninstall program.

the above error was no more.  

Friday 3 March 2023

Resolved: An unknown error has occurred in outlook. mail could not be sent. the message has been moved to your drafts folder.

Issue: an unknown error has occurred in outlook. mail could not be sent. the message has been moved to your drafts folder. 

Issue detail:

User A has full access on user B mailbox. have migrate User B mailbox to Exchange 2019 recently, but User A was still on Exchange 2013. After that the issue was started (User A was unable to send email from User B mailbox, of which he has the rights)

Before migration of user B mailbox, there was no issue, User A was able to send the emails from User B.

Solution:

Did two things to resolve this issue:

  1. migration User A as well to exchange 2019
  2. Assign the permission again on User B to user A.

 




Sunday 27 November 2022

[Solved]: A server-side database availability group administrative operation failed. Error The operation failed. CreateCluster errors may result from incorrectly configured static addresses.

Environment Detail:

 Deploying Exchange server 2019, 6 servers on PR site and 3 servers on DR site. After installation and DAG creation PR site 6 servers were added to the DAG successfully but on the DR site 3 servers getting the following error while adding these servers from ECP or even from the servers powershell, using the following command.

Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer -Identity DAG19 -MailboxServer servername

Error:

A server-side database availability group administrative operation failed. Error The operation failed. CreateCluster errors may result from incorrectly configured static addresses.

 Error: An error occurred while attempting a cluster operation. Error: Cluster API failed: "AddClusterNode() (MaxPercentage=12) failed with 0x35. Error: The network path was not found". [Server: servername.cp.IG.com]


Solution:

uninstall the failover cluster feature with the following command.

Remove-windowsfeature failover-clustering

Restart the server

Try to add the server, Run the following powershell command on the required server.

Add-DatabaseAvailabilityGroupServer -Identity DAG19 -MailboxServer servername

 and server was added without any issue.

Solution details:

Nearly same issue is discussed here with same solution.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-server/high-availability/duplicate-address-error-validate-failover-cluster

I have created the effected VMs from same image and per above link it seems the failover cluster feature was installed, and which have assigned same MAC address to the three VMs. may find the following lines in Microsoft article. 

"

  • The referenced servers are built from the same image and automatically create the Cluster NetFT adapter on each node with an identical MAC address. Failover clustering flags this as an error because it requires unique physical addresses.

"

with removing and re installing the failover cluster feature that MAC addresses were changed. 

Monday 15 August 2022

How to find the name of requester of a server component in exchange server 2013 and then make the server component active

 Some time you may need to put the exchange server in maintenance mode, in which one step is to put the servercomponents in inactive state and after the completion of the activity will have to remove the server from maintenance, in which one step is to use the following command in exchange powershell to make the servercomponents back in active state


Set-ServerComponentState <ServerName> -Component ServerWideOffline -State Active -Requester Maintenance


but some time the above command will not work and will still have some components in inactive state, even if try the above command again.

So in that case, you first have to identify requester and then use the command accordingly.

like in below command we are identifying the requester for AutoDiscoverProxy inactive state.


[PS] C:\Windows\system32>$Requester = Get-ServerComponentstate -Identity ex1301 -Component AutoDiscoverProxy

[PS] C:\Windows\system32>$Requester.LocalStates


Requester                                             State Timestamp                     Component

---------                                             ----- ---------                     ---------

HealthApi                                          Inactive 6/23/2022 9:49:25 AM          AutoDiscoverProxy

Maintenance                                          Active 6/23/2022 10:35:04 AM         AutoDiscoverProxy

functional                                           Active 6/23/2022 10:33:34 AM         AutoDiscoverProxy



We can see that the HealthApi is the Requester for this component. so now we will use the following command.


Set-ServerComponentState Ex1301 -Component AutoDiscoverProxy -State Active -Requester HealthApi


after that, we can check the status of all server components again with following command.


Get-ServerComponentState <ServerName> | ft Component,State –Autosize 


and the required components should be in active state.