RE: [exim] Exchange move

>Nice, but not as good as a sound argument backed by facts would have
>been though.

Well, feel free to come visit. How can I document that our environment
works?

>I actually expect this to be the job of the server. How should I take
>care of my data, should I stop people sending and receiving emails, or
>prevent people from opening their mailbox.

Yes, the system _does_ take care of that. Just back up the data, and the
consistency checks gets done.


>Should I EXPECT corruption as a day-to-day part of running an exchange
>server and allocate extra resources to hunting for it? It sounds like a
>lot of EXTRA work, are you a volunteer that doesn't need paying or does
>this cost time and money?

Sure, I'll set up your backup environment for you. Grant me remote access
and we're in business, as long as you are willing to run the backups in a
_proper_ way, we can certainly prevent future corruption.




>If all the tools I can find tell me my databases are consistent and all
>my backups tell me everything on the tape is OK, yet my users have blank
>e-mails with no body or attachments and my backup tapes contain only
>messages without a body or attachments.

Curiosity here; Exactly which tools is that you have used? Backup Exec will
catch it, ARCServe will catch it so on, so forth.

And _how_ have you backed it up? You say that you use flat file, file system
backups. Which I have stated _will not_ check your data for you.


>I DO HAVE CORRUPT E-MAILS AND DATABASES

Well, you should do something about that then.


>I think you read the documentation TOO MUCH. The real world is much
>different.

Well, I have been running exchange environments for 50 user offices, and for
7.000 user enterprises. I have had corrupted databases, but it has never
been a complete shut down. It has never been any been more of a problem then
to revert back with a point in time recovery, or usually one or two corrupt
mails, which usually is easy to bring back from a mailbox-backup.


>Last Point, my E-mail suggested that people considering using exchange
>should get a 120-day eval and try doing backups, restores and repairs
>using the microsoft documentation.

Yes, they certainly should do that. But, my personal recommendation would be
to add an agent based backup to the set up. Both Backup Exec and ARCServe is
simply faster then NTBackup, and the level of possible automation is
excellent.

>If I'm spreading FUD why would I be encouraging users to prove me wrong
>and find out that everything I said were lies by doing it themselves?

Well, with just your "success story" people may be reluctant to do so, hence
I thought I'd provide my own views of exchange.