That’s what my week was like last week. This week is off to a much better start.
We had a major server upgrade at our second largest client(25 users) on the 23rd of April. It was an upgrade from an old Compaq server running NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to SBS 2003 on a sweet dual Xeon Dell Poweredge. We, thought to process would go as smooth as all other server migrations have for us in the past, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Now there were a quite a few reasons that this upgrade was taking place, one however, was because about a month ago Exchange and the Symantec for Exchange(2.1) got in a fight over a file and Exchange lost, shutting down the store. It took some work to get everything back running, but Exchange never seemed to run the same since.
While migrating all the data off the old server, Exchange decided to barf again, this time in a much worse way. We were forced to go on with the install and couldn’t worry about peoples mailboxes until the new server was completely in place and functional.
Then the new server all of sudden started having stability problems. We couldn’t access it from the console or from any type of remote connection. Even though the clients could still access all server resources just fine. I remotely shut down Exchange services and then we hard powered the beast. Man, did that have me nervous.
The next day, the new server had the same problems. We were forced to call MS to get some assistance on the issue. He termserved in and looked around only to say he didn�t see anything wrong. The event viewer was void any concrete details.
As it stands now, we believe it had/has something to do with the original schedule in Backup Exec(9.1). We turned off the back up schedule and the machine has been completely stable. We�ve since rescheduled the backup and it�s still stable.
All this consumed my entire week. It was the most frustrating week I�ve ever had and I�m glad it�s mostly over.