jamescuarterodotcom

i have an exchange 2000 server that also happens to be a domain controller. it’s not ideal or recommended, but until i can get another server ordered, configured and safely migrate all the accounts it will have to do. lately i’d been hit with attacks on a couple of different ports that i closed off with my firewall, IPsec & TCP/IP filtering. the problem is that turning on TCP/IP filtering requires a restart, which takes a good 10-15 minutes, downtime that i can’t afford during the work day (and as it turns out, TCP/IP filtering messes with my exchange services). likewise, i can’t restart after automatic updates until after work hours. the icing on the cake was my discovery of an fxscanner on my machine that had gone undetected by norton AV (showing up as fxsvc.exe, if you’re interested) and needed to be disabled upon restart.

lee derbyshire solves my problems in an article on msexchange.org:

The official advice from Microsoft is that you should not install Exchange 2000 / 2003 on a Domain Controller. Of course, in the real world, there are many Exchange DCs out there… In such a situation, it’s easy to believe that it’s only your server that behaves like this, and that there’s something wrong with it. Well, actually, they all do that - it’s a known problem, caused by the fact that the server shuts down its Active Directory services before it shuts down the Exchange services.

the article also provides a batch file for shutting down exchange services first, then AD. nice! check out lee’s website, where you can find an OWA client for PDA or even WAP-enabled phone. boy, i wish i was this smart.