CapnPugwash

Great ! Thanks everyone for all your help

This is (one of the many) bits I'm confused by... are my MX records sorted? They are sorted by externally by our ISP/County but do I need MX records in the internal DNS? & if so why can't I find an MX record for in internal DNS for 'mail.oldomain.com' ? Thanks for your reply - much appreciated

OK, in DNS I've created a new forward lookup zone 'mail.newdomain.com' Within this zone I've created a new 'A' record pointing at the Exchange server & an MX record pointing at the 'A' record. Am I done? Is it as simple as assigning services in Exchange to my new SSL?

Hi Roberto, Thanks for the reply. To be honest I think I'm in a bit of a tangle and the information I'm giving you all is most certainly NOT the best, mainly because I have a limited understanding of what it is I'm doing. DNS & Email has been set up / tinkered with by various people over the last 10 years. Now there is just me. Getting a third party in to sort this is a definite no no. Back tracking a little bit. Our new external domain name is to reflect the recent name change of the school. Our internal domain name is unchanged. I have installed the SSL certs for the website & VLE & these work fine. I only have to sort out the SSL for Exchange. I've installed the cert on Exchange but the services (IMAP, POP, IIS, SMTP) are still assigned to the old SSL for the old domain name. I did try assigning the services to the new SSL cert but OWA didn't work as expected - I either couldn't connect locally or I couldn't connect externally - I can't remember which & I haven't had time to re-check The domain host (County) has MX records pointing to our Exchange server from both the old domain name and the old domain name I assume that I need a local MX record for internal emails? I can't find an MX record in local DNS but there is a forward lookup zone called mail.olddomain.county.com If I run nslookup set type = mx & point it at mydomain.internal, it doesn't return any MX info. If I point it at olddomain.com or newdomain.com it gives me info on the MX record that our domain host has... It could be that I'm barking up the wrong tree(s) with all of this....

OK... Maybe somebody is reading this?! Hope so. I can't actually find the original MX record in DNS. I have a forward lookup zone called mail.oldschool.county.com - when I try and create a new MX record here, it has the FQDN hardwired in - mail.oldschool.county.com If I try and create a new MX record anywhere else, this is not the case. I've got to figure this out, I do have a good week to do it, so it should be do-able(!) Like I said before Any advice welcomed!

Hmmmm Not quite as I thought. I've just tried to create a new MX record,the FQDN info is already there and can't be changed. It's set to mail.oldschool.county.com

Hi, We run Exchange 2010 on site. We have recently changed our external domain name from oldschool.county.com to newschool.county.com. Our internal domain name is the same (oldschool.internal) for the next few months BOTH external domain names will exist In a months time the old domain will not exist, we have no control over this. All our staff use OWA to access their email from home, currently they log in via https://mail.oldschool.county.com but I need to change it so that they can access mail via the new address I have a new SSL cert for the Exchange server. I have installed is but not assigned it to any services (in Server Configuration -> Exchange Certificates) I *think* before I do that I'm going to have to do something with MX records. In DNS I have a record for mail.oldschool.county.com that points to exchange. From what I've read (not understood!) I should be able to create a 2nd MX record called mail.newschool.county.com & point it to Exchange without causing myself any problems Then if I go to Exchange (Server Configuration -> Exchange Certificates) and assign the services to my new SSL ... everything should work ok.... Any advice welcomed! This is the kind of thing that gives me kittens... NOTE : I've set up the new mail addresses and they work fine. Staff receive email sent to either [email protected] or [email protected], the new address is set as the primary address

For anyone interested : This seemed to only affect a few members of staff. With Hotmail, it either resolved itself OR they got the recipient to add the new email address in 'contacts' and that sorted it. One company we deal with had to whitelist our new domain but since then we've had no issues. Bizarre. I have to assume that the domain name change triggered spam filters (in some instances) ... I'm happy it all seems to be resolved but if anyone can explain what might have happened I'd love to know.

Hi, We aren't blacklisted... I can send emails to a Hotmail account I've set up and they all get through OK. I can get other users to email this address & have no issues. I've checked our server IP and domain name in Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted & they come back as clean. What seems to be the issue is : if a user has previously emailed an external address from [email protected], when they send that external address an email from [email protected] their email is dumped into the spam folder... this doesn't apply to all external addresses... in some cases it seems random. I'm struggling with this one!

Hi, This is driving me abit mad... We have an Exchange 2010 server. Our domain WAS oldDomain.county.uk, it's NOW newDomain.county.uk. The company hosting our domains has left both of them live, in three months time oldDomain.county.uk will cease to exist. I've set newDomain.county.uk as the primary address in Exchange. All emails sent to [email protected] & [email protected] are routed to the same mailbox but all replies come from [email protected]. Everything was working fine - or so I thought - I'm now getting reports from various users that 'some' emails they are sending to external accounts are not being received. I've checked our IP & domain name - we are not blacklisted. Also one of the external providers a few people are having problems with is Hotmail - I've set up a test Hotmail account and I can email it without issue. I've also had the users with issues email it and they have also had no problem. The issue appears to have no rhyme or reason - the only thing I can think of is that some email providers are seeing emails as having originated from two domains / addresses but the same IP and treating the emails as spam... Can anyone suggest anything for to look at, this is driving me BONKERS!

Ah... it looks like I can only 'Assign services' to one certificate - sorted!

Hi, we've recently changed our external domain name (mynewschool.mycounty.com) . The old domain name (myoldschool.mycounty.com) will remain live for two months. On our exchange server we have an SSL cert installed for the old domain, this works fine. I've now been sent a PFX file for the new domain. Can I import the PFX and leave the old SSL cert on there as well or do I need to delete it? Thanks in advance

OK, thanks everyone. It looks like HTTP is easy and HTTPS is a bit more complicated. We get our SSL certs through the LEA. It looks like we can use a SAN cert (a bit like a fancy wildcard cert?) that will cover usage for both domains AND all sub domains. This isn't the kind of stuff I do every day but it *looks* like I shouldn't have too many problems... !!!!!!!!!!!

Hi, next year our school is changing it's name. We are registering a new domain name for our website / VLE / Exchange 2010 server & getting new SSL certs. For a couple of months both the old & the new domain names will exist and will point at the same IP addresses. Once I've installed the new SSL cert on the Exchange 2010 server, I think I need to make some configuration changes to it so that it will accept email sent to the new domain name. I know I'll definitely need to add the new domain to: Organization Configuration -> Hub Transport -> Accepted Domains What else will I need to do? Can I force Exchange to accept incoming email to the old domain name but make all outgoing email have the new domain name as the address?

We have an Ubuntu server running Apache, from which we host our website (Joomla) & VLE (Moodle). Each has a separate IP address. In the new year we are changing the name of our school, so we are in the process of registering a new domain name. for a couple of months both the old domain name and the new one will exist. I want both domain names to point to the same sites. Is this as easy as creating new virtual host files in apache2/sites-available and enabling them? Example : In my sites available I currently have four virtual host files, myschool, myschool-ssl, myschoolvle, myschoolvle-ssl. Can I create four more virtual host files myNEWschool, myNEWschool-ssl, myNEWschoolvle, myNEWschoolvle-ssl, pointing at the same website/VLE and IP address but with different domain names? *NOTE* I know I'll need new SSL certs!

I know this has probably cropped up a million times before but what measures do you put in place to protect your Joomla / Moodle sites? Specifically if the webserver is onsite & a flavour of Ubuntu? Do you just keep everything up to date or do you use additional tools? We went through a phase of being constantly hacked. Long story, the short version being we didn't update Ubuntu/Joomla/Moodle for a long time and suffered because of it. Since we've started managing things better we haven't had any issues. On top of that we use brute force - we ban traffic to and from a group of countries. I know this isn't great but we are a small secondary school in a small area - we don't have worldwide appeal! Apache Logs Viewer (freeware : Apache Logs Viewer | Analyze & View Apache/IIS Log Files) to make nice reports to frighten people with & 'OSE Anti-Hacker for Joomla' which is an inexpensive Joomla module that *should* detect & stop most SQL injection / PHP attacks (I say *should* not because it doesn't but because I'm not expert enough to give it a glowing endorsement or not.... looking at it's log files, it certainly seems to be stopping a lot of stuff) Despite all of this, I still don't feel 100% confident of how secure our sites are...

That's great. I'll leave that be. Everything else looks easy enough, I think we can buy our domain names & certs through the County, who are also our broadband suppliers, so it *should* be plain sailing

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I'm in the same boat. Our current domain is SchoolName.County.sch.uk & we are in the process of changing the school name. If I understand this correctly I will need to: * Buy new domain names (for the website, Moodle and Exchange OWA) * Buy new SSL's for all three new names * Sort it out with our ISP re: redirecting traffic to the new sites The post above suggests I might not have to change my internal domain name... ? I think I'd rather it matched the name change but if it's a mountain of bother then I might not be so keen!

Wow. Backup of the Exchange server completed and the size of the DB dropped from 280GB to 210GB! Job done. Thanks everyone.

Ah... looking at Veeam I can see that I didn't have the 'Enable-Application aware image processing' box checked for Exchange (the logs are set to truncate upon successful backup) - I'll re-run the backups and see if this resolves the issue.

Is it the log files - what backup are you running against exchange - is it one that will trncate the logs? I *think* the only backup is through Veeam... This may be a complete shot in the dark but we recently upgraded to Veeam 7.0.... could it be connected? Like I say, I'm not Exchange savvy so feel free to correct me!

Is it the log files - what backup are you running against exchange - is it one that will trncate the logs? Unsure. It's a VM & was set up before I started. I'll dig in and see. Can you identify which file(s) are growing? Using TreeSize I can see that yesterday the size of the Mailbox Database was 280.5GB, today it is 282.7 - this increase is in the folder that contains the log files. I'm not super Exchange savvy so I may be mis-understanding something, but that's what I'm seeing. --- At the current rate of expansion I will have to increase the disk size again before the end of the week otherwise I'll have problems with external mail again... obviously I cant do this too often!!! Thanks for all your comments

Good suggestions but I don't think any of them will resolve the issue. We already do most of these and have a policy that empties a users deleted items folder after a period of time. Running a powershell script that produces a CSV file showing all mailboxes and their size, I can see that mailboxes are unlikely to be the issue... if it's not the mailboxes then, at a guess, it's the logs. Like I say - Advice / suggestions welcome!

We have been running Exchange 2010 on a Windows Server 2008r2 VM for a few years without any issues. Recently, we had a problem with sending / receiving external emails. The problem was due to a lack of space on the disk that the Exchange DB sits on. I increased the disk size by 20GB and all was well again. Since then I've noticed that the disk space is being eaten up at a rate of 1GB a day. I've ran various powershell commands to look at incoming /outgoing mail and I can't see anything untoward... Advice / suggestions welcome!

It's an issue with the software. We had the same problem (over a year ago!) & engaged with the software developers to the point where they actually took away one of our machines (all our machines are DELL, running Windows 7) away for a week but we didn't get to the bottom of it. At the time, I had seen quite a few similar complaints abut this series of language products, so the company is well aware (and has been for some time) of the issue. They advised us to load the software onto our Moodle and run the audio from that. Not sure if that was 'a fix' as our MFL teachers are not Moodle fans and try not to use it. I still get complaints regularly... The software did work fine on Win XP... If you find an actual fix, I'd be really interested to know what it is!