VMWare - UTF-8 Encoding Error

Today I had to import a VM we received into our ESX environment to do some data scrubbing. They gave me a raw VM instead of a nice OVF I could import, but it was small so I ran it through the VMWare Converter to get it into ESX. After the process was complete and I started up the VM, I got the following error message:



Not the most fun thing in the world at this point. I figured that since this VM likely passed through a couple different systems before making it to its final resting place in my ESX Environment, something went wrong along the way. Digging around the internets I found this post that discusses this error and how you can quickly correct it by doing a quick edit to the VMX file of the VM: Linkage.

I edited out the line in my VMX file that John mentions in his post and my VM fired up just fine. Good quick fix which I must say I am a fan of.

Exchange 2010 - Resource Calendar Issues w/ Outlook 2003

This morning I came in to an e-mail from a user having trouble connecting to the calendar of some resource mailboxes I recently migrated over to Exchange 2010. He could open one of the three just fine, but the other two gave him the following error:



I checked to make sure he had Encrypted communication to the Exchange Server enabled and he did, and I also verified he was running SP3 on Outlook 2003 which he was. I did some searching and came upon this post on the Microsoft Technet Forums: Linkage.

From that thread it seems like there is an issue with Outlook 2003 connecting up to shared calendars on Exchange 2010 that at least according to that thread will be fixed in Exchange 2010 Rollup 5. I couldn't really wait that long, so I went ahead and migrated the user's mailbox over to Exchange 2010 ahead of schedule to see if that would fix the problem. Sure enough, once his mailbox migrated and I got his Outlook pointed at the new server he could connect up to all 3 calendars just fine.

Not exactly the solution I wanted at this point but it's better than nothing.

Moving Exchange 2010 Mailboxes - INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS

So last night I set up a batch of my user mailboxes to move over from the 2003 server to the 2010 server. Most of them worked just fine, with the exception of one user whose mailbox threw an Active Directory error when attempting the move request. The error message was of course long and fantastic, but what stood out to me was the line INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS.

Did some searching and found this post discussing this error and how you can fix it: Linkage.

After setting security inheritance on the user object in AD and clearing out the old move request in the EMS by using the Remove-MoveRequest command, I was able to do a new move request that completed successfully. What's interesting is that the user was not in any protected AD groups (i.e. Domain Admins, Schema Admins) so i'm curious as to why his security inheritance was disabled. Regardless, the mailbox finally moved over so that's OK with me for now.

Exchange 2010 - Disappearing Mailbox

One thing that nearly gave me a heart attack this week was when I moved my boss' mailbox over to the new Exchange 2010 server from our 2003 server and after being there for a few minutes, it randomly vanished. I could not find it listed under disconnected mailboxes, no remnants on the 2003 server, no nothing. Needless to say, I was less than thrilled.

Searching around on the net I stumbled upon the helpful powershell command Clean-MailboxDatabase. According to the MS documentation on the command, running this against your mailbox database will scan for disconnected mailboxes that have not yet been marked as disconnected in the Store, and mark them as such.

After doing this, my boss' mailbox showed up in the disconnected mailboxes pane in EMC, and I was able to reconnect it using the Connect-Mailbox command. Crisis averted, everything went back to how it should be.

I should note that I have still not been able to determine what caused the mailbox to disappear in the first place, but should this happen to anyone else hopefully this will do the trick for you.

One.

I've tried this once or twice before, but I figured perhaps I would give this whole blog thing one more shot to document things I experience in my silly IT career. We shall see if it sticks this go around. My money is on no.