Agramont.net

Hi all,

Currently working on large education project supporting some 1300 domains and 1300 Global Address Lists.

To date only 300 of the 1300 institutions are using MAPI for access for Email (the reminder using OWA).

Things have moved on and I am now face with limitation with the globalAddressList attribute.....thus looking at the makeGALlinked feature.

Full HMC is not really a runner here....we have much of the functionality already in place via customised provisioning system etc. Plus we have further complication with 3rd party providers controlling elements of the Active Directory......we have deployment tools inplace, monitoring software, reporting tools etc so basically the full HMC solution would not bring much to the party if you understand. We have had some initial discussions with MS but they are obviously keen to sell in the full HMC plus consultancy.....but to be honest our solution has been in place for 3 yrs so this is not an option......would be massive upheaval for customer plus 3rd party companies etc....

 Cutting to the chase,  my "globalAddressList" attribute has 300 entries.......I appreciate the makeGALlinked should be run before any exchange servers are in place but in our case we have our 8 backend servers plus frontends already in production (for nearly 4 yrs) ...running Exchange 2003 SP2 (on Windows 2003 SP1).........

The HMC guide advise on running before any exchange servers are installed (or it could result in a rebuild!!)...I sure do not want to go there......have you any thoughts on  removing all 300 address and running the makeGALLinked and synch'ing back in my total GALS (1300)......

We did test this in a lab environment 4 times.....we reset the globalAddressList attribute by using LDP.....the first time we did that, we reset the value to "blank"....we ran the makeGallinked.exe and it reported successful completion........but our Configuration container became corrupted....could not expand the container....

On subsequent tests, we reset the value using LDP to just include the Default Global Address List and then removed that value using ADSI (just trying something different). We then ran the makeGallinked utility, everything completed successfully. We then ran our sync from the All Global Address Lists container (1300 entries) to the globalAddresslist attribute. All completed successfully. We repeated this process 2 more times and it completed successfully.

Any advice on progressing this issue?

.....is there any other part of the HMC solution that relies on this change...would i break anything else in doing this?

 Thanks in advance.

For the most part I think you're going down the right direction.  The globalAddressList attribute is not really used by the HMC solution itself, but more just of an exchange thing.  Going down the route that you're already headed is the same approach that I would have taken, so I can't see anything wrong with it.

 When you do this in production, can you report back your findings?  Sharing is good! 

Thanks Conrad,

I will let you know how I work out, I will probably need to come to an agreement with Microsoft before going near my production (or QA)environment. We need to have some sort of buy in from them from a support point of view......so if we need to purchase a 5 consultancy days from them for example, then this is what we will do.......running it ourselves is not any option....if it happened to fail or corrupt the AD, I would be done at the local job centre looking for a new job !

Conrad,

We were considering taking a DC in the root domain and moving the FSMO roles to it......then disconnecting it from the network and trying to run the update?...would this be a runner in your experience ?

I assume that because this is a schema change, that there is no rollback available after running the makeGALLinked utility?

Thanks again,

Mark

Hi Conrad,

Could you confirm that changes this utility does are not connected to HMC/MPS?

Our situation is similar to Lex, but slightly different. We have not so many GALs ATM – this is difference. We are not and will not use HMC – this is similarity.

We are going to avoid this limitation in the future, so please confirm that this is connected to AD and needs to be done on any Exchange environment.

Also please tell me - is any way to do this manually, without makegallinked.exe tool. 

We use Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2003 SP2.

Thank you,

Ilya.