All over a sudden your network users can't access their mailboxes on your mail server. Help-Desk calls are increasing in traffic. You're running exchange server 2003 who mail database has dismounted. You ping the server and you recieve a response that its online. Yes, you can log into the server admin applet to check for possible causes of the problem.
How do you deal with an Exchange server 2003 whose database has dismounted? How do you mount the database on a server whose disk space has been consumed by the Transaction logs till it can't process any further in-coming/out-going mail? This article is basically based on practical experience on what happened to my mail servers paralysing communication. The volume on which the Database was stored was 100GB and yes the circular logging was not enabled because we are using a proprietary backup system which if configured properly should be able to delete non-committed transaction logs.
Examining the server resources, it was evident the volume which stored the mailbox store had been depleted. Transaction logs each of size 512k had done the job.Since 2006,June we did Veritas Backup exec upgrade and the configuration was not done right.The back up ran fine and yes the mail communication was fine till 5.27pm 5th January,2008 when the mailbox store went down. The volute at 5.27pm could not commit any further transaction logs. The mailbox store dismounted and that explains why network users could not access their emails thus the help-desk calls.
A volume of 100GB was all gone and only zero kilobytes of free space existed. If you're in such a situation. Your Chief of Party wants to communicate with his experts.Phones jumping off the hook,time to prove your troubleshooting skills is yesterday!!! You can't re-mount the mailbox store till you free up space on that volume,period. Eh!!! you don't want delete those "useless" transactions logs mannually my man! Microsoft does not advise you to do just that either.If you try to run veritas back up exec on the assumption that after the appropriate configuration it will work, it wont be able to connect to the database either.But thanks for changing the configuration correct. It will be handy much later in the process. The solution is to free up space on that volume somehow!!!
This is how I got about it.Make a deliberate selection of all transaction logs starting from the oldest and compress them. You will be amazed by the amount of space recovered! If you can regain about 10GB, which you should anyway, go ahead try to re-mount the Mailbox store! Bingo! The mailbox store will remount. Remember you have not deleted any transactions logs just as yet. Check your proprietary back up system for property configuration that ensures that transaction logs are flushed after the back up done successfully. If you do not run a vender back up system then, you will have to make a decision to enable circular logging. At this point go ahead run a differential backup which if configured properly should delete uncommitted transction logs.On completion of the backup you should be able to notice a massive recovery of the volume!
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