Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Watch out! Exchange Recovery Groups!


So this is good times. Today I'm having trouble creating a user. I use the Add User Wizard and it reports success. Sure enough, the user appears in the Users' snap-in with no problems. But for some reason, this user can't use OWA (503 Item not found error) and they can't log onto Outlook either.

What's up?

The Add User Wizard creates the user in the first storage group it finds. If you've done an Exchange specific restore using the Exchange Recovery Group, the Add User Wizard places the users mailbox in this store. When the user tries to logon, they have no mailbox in the First Storage Group, and they fail to logon to their mailbox.

How do you fix this?

Well, simply remove the Exchange Recovery Group. Simply right click on the Recovery Storage Group and choose Delete. Once the only storage group left is the First Storage Group, you're good to add users using the Add User Wizard again!

Happy User Creating!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not seeing this on Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition so you might want to check whether this is an SBS specific issue or not. Perhaps it's down to the SBS user creation wizard? (I assume there is a wizard for that?)

Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Standard that isn't also an FE to test it against.

I tested with the store mounted and dismounted. Two users created OK and could use OWA and Outlook. Tested with the group and store called the default and a custom names group and store (which was the 1st SG and Store, just renamed)

Anonymous said...

Sigh,
When I talked about mounted and dismounted stores I was talking about the store in the RSG rather than the live store. Sorry for any confusion there.

Sean Daniel said...

You are correct though, this is a specific issue with the Small Business Server Add User Wizard. Exchange 2003 Enterprise edition with the Active Directory Users and Computers Add User Wizard doesn't have this issue.

Anonymous said...

Sean,

Just wanted to drop you a quick note to say thanks for this post. We were having this problem today, had tried all sorts of voodoo rubbish to get it fixed, and then found your blog :-)

Cheers
Jon