The C-spot

During a move mailbox operation at one of my customers from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, I received the following error:

Error:
Active Directory operation failed on <name of DC>. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.
Active directory response: 00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150E8A, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0

The user has insufficient access rights.

When validating the AD security permissions with other mailbox users that are owkay, I noticed a difference in security permissions; more specific, the permissions were not inherited. Must have been something wrong in the past with this user.

To make the move operation run smoothly, I activated the “include inheritable permissions… “on this user security properties

/Cheers, Peter

In a solid running environment with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 and Exchange 2007, the daily backup job of Exchange started failing with following error, after upgrading to Backup Exec 2010 version:

Final error: 0xe000fed1 – A failure occurred querying the Writer status. Final error category: Resource Errors

Here are the steps I used to resolve the issue:

a) check event log on Exchange Server

– Event ID 9609 – Exchange VSS Writer (instance 904411c7-69b4-461b-9899-9e6dd5b07d52:135) failed with error code -2403 when preparing for Snapshot.

– Event ID 9840 – An attempt to prepare the storage group ‘First Storage Group’ for backup failed because the storage group is already in the process of being backed up. The error code is -2403. (Note that if a backup was recently aborted, then it may take several minutes for the system to detect the aborted backup and initiate backup cleanup procedures, so this message may be generated if an attempt was made to backup a storage group before a previous backup attempt had fully terminated.) 

owkay, something is really going wrong

b) a first check on Symantec support and Microsoft Technet leaded to the following suggestions:

– install hotfixes on Windows 2003 box (not relevant as it was fully patched)

– verify AOFO (open file option from Symantec) was installed (you can check this from ackup Exec – Tools – install remote agents and select the Exchange server; it gave a message in this wizard that the open was installed and running successfully; that’s not it

c) Another Microsoft KB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930800) suggested to dismount / remount the Exchange database, as well as verifying if VSS engine was running owkay

– dismounting store was not possible, as it alerted me the backup process was running; I made this possible by stopping the information store service (as was suggested as 2nd option in the same article)

Solution: restarting the Information Store or reboot Exchange Server, simple as that

(some further background investigation learned me that the VSS engine gets somehow updated / replaced by the Backup Exec AOFO engine upgrade from 12.5 to 2010, which requires a reboot apparently. Only drawback is that this is not mentioned during the remote agent upgrade…)

/Cheers, Peter