Technology at Harley

Last weekend our email server hit the database size limit and dismounted the information store, halting all email transport and access.

Originally with Exchange 2003 Standard Edition there was a 16GB limit on the information store. This was one of the factors used to force you to upgrade to the Enterprise Edition which is ridiculously more expensive . When the database hit that size it would dismount causing all your users to start wrapping torches and sharpening pitchforks. They enabled a registry tweak to allow you 1 more GB of space to allow you to mount the store and reclaim some space by deleting old email.

With Service Pack 2 they upped the default limit to 18GB, which is the threshold we hit a few days ago, and allowed an absolute limit of up to 75GB. You can set this limit with another registry tweak.

Of course this couldn’t have happened on a weekday when I was here, it had to happen on a Saturday while I was out to lunch with the family and some friends. Figures…

I’ve been meaning to reorganize one of our servers racks for quite a while now. I have a big UPS to mount in the rack, but according to the manufacturer they recommend not mounted any servers within 12-18 inches of the transformer as the magnets inside can damage other magnetic media such as server hard drives.

In order to mount this UPS, I had to move 2 servers to made the necessary room.  Unfortunately, they were two very important server that couldn’t be arbitrarily turned off: Exchange (email) and Oracle (our student information system database).

Usually I would do something like this early in the morning before school starts, but family responsibilities now make that impossible. I ended up doing it in the morning on the first day of holiday break. Nobody was around so the timing wasn’t as important.

I wanted to mount these all in one solid block, but that 2u-sized hole in the middle was about 1/32″ too small to slide the email server into.  I still don’t really understand why it didn’t fit and was not very happy about it because I had already shut down the email server. So instead of a 5 minute move, I had to remount the rails and it turned into a 30 minute affair. It all worked out in the end though.