StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 Error with 2 Database Copies

When you have a DAG with only two nodes, the StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 script is smart enough to recognize that you can't have 2 additional copies of the database. However, if you have more than 2 DAG members, then the script complains that it can't run because the local database copy is required for redundancy.

I ran into this at a client where we created a database in the DR site for running test cmdlets with SCOM. There are two copies of the database in the DR site. Other databases have two copies in the main site and one copy in the DR site.

You can override the default behaviour with the switch OverrideMinimumTwoCopies.

Example:

StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 -Server DAGnode1 -OverrideMinimumTwoCopies

Getting Status Totals in PowerShell

I was doing an Exchange migration on the weekend and had a large number of move requests. Being the slightly OCD computer person as most of us are, I wanted to see how things were progressing occasionally. However, I didn't want to be dumping stuff into spreadsheets and be counting items.

After few false starts, I ran across the Group-Object cmdlet. For me, this cmdlet is in the same category as Measure-Object. I've never had a need in the past. Now I'm happy to have it.

My solution:

Get-MoveRequest | Group-Object -Property Status

The results looked like this:

Synchronizing Remote IP Ranges Across Recieve Connectors

Exchange 2010 and later do a nice job of providing high availability with database availability groups (DAGs) and load balancing. However, one configuration detail doesn't automatically synchronize between multiple Exchange servers, and that is receive connectors.

If you create receive connectors for relaying output from printers or scanners then the connector you create is unique on each server. That's fine if you are pointing the devices at individual Exchange servers but to have high availability, you need multiple load balanced servers with the same configuration. To do this, you need to create the same receive connectors on each server.

During intial setup creating 2 or 4 receive connectors with the same settings for authentication and such isn't too big a deal. The item that's a pain is the remote IP ranges that are allowed to use the receive connector. Many organizations have a large list of individual IP addresses that are allowed to use the receive connector.

If there is a list of 50 individual IP addresses, it's a long process to enter once, let alone multiple times. Not to mention, there is the risk of administrators adding or removing IP addresses to the list on one server, but not others, or typos.

Here is a quick and easy way to synchronize the remote IP ranges from a receive connector on one server to another.

$Source=Get-RecieveConnector Server\ConnectorName
$Destination=Get-ReceiveConnector Server\ConnectorName
Set-ReceiveConnector $Destination -RemoteIPRanges $Source.RemoteIPRanges

In the example above:

• $Source is the connector you are copying the remote IP ranges from
• $Destination is the connector your are copying the remote IP ranges to

It is not necessary to use a variable for the destination receive connector. I did that to clarify what is happening in the Set-ReceiveConnector command. You could put the identity of the destination receive connector directly in the Set-ReceiveConnector command.

If you need to do this on a regular basis, you can put the receive connector into an array and use a foreach loop to set them all in a script like this:

$Source=Get-RecieveConnector Server\ConnectorName
$Destination=Get-ReceiveConnector | Where { $_.name -like "Relay*"}

ForEach ($d in $Destination) {
    Set-ReceiveConnector $d -RemoteIPRanges $Source.RemoteIPRanges
}