Urgent: SBS 2003 problem...

[Zucarita9000]

Here's the deal, a few days ago we had a burglary in the office and the server was stolen. The new network setup was not even finished, so that means no backups tapes.

I hade to reinstall and reconfigure the server, running SBS 2003. Of course, Exchange had to be reinstalled, so the mailboxes are now empty.

However, every user still have a local cached copy of their mailboxes, but if they work in online mode in Outlook, the mailbox is empty. If they switch to offline mode, the local cached copy is loaded.

How can I import the local copies into the server?

 

[Zucarita9000]

Please, please, please, I need help today!

 

[Genx87]

Have you tried to export to a .pst when in offline mode? Then import the .pst into their mailbox when they are back in online mode.

btw I have to give you a little grief for setting up a production enviornment without a backup solution

naughty naughty

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Genx87
btw I have to give you a little grief for setting up a production enviornment without a backup solution

naughty naughty

Yes yes yes... you are right. It happened like this: Everything was working perfect, this was on friday. I was going to set all the backup stuff the next monday, and the office got robbed during friday night.

We're now deciding wich type of media we want for the backup. Tape, REVs, hdds... not sure yet.


I'll try exporting to a .pst and import the file back in the mailbox. I was hoping there was an easier solution, like an "consolidate mailbox" command or such.

Thanks.

 

[stimpyman77]

Zucarita9000,

Sorry to hear about the server .. that must have been a pain.. Try downloading EXMerge from Microsoft and using that to reimport mailboxes back to the server. Check out this link. Hope it helps... I have used this program before with good results.

Good Luck...

 

[Zucarita9000]

Thanks a lot Stimpy, will give it a try.

 

[Czar]

exmerge to import pst files to the exchange mailboxes

 

[Zucarita9000]

Export to .pst and reimport to the Exchange mailbox worked just fine.

Another problem we're having is that noone can access client computers on the network, a warning dialog box says that there's no access to that computer.

I believe it has something to do with the fact that I had to create all the users and computers from scratch. Is there anything I sould check?

 

[Genx87]

If you had to recreate computer accounts you will need to rejoin them to the domain.

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Genx87
If you had to recreate computer accounts you will need to rejoin them to the domain.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. Thanks for the confirmation.

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Genx87
If you had to recreate computer accounts you will need to rejoin them to the domain.

Damn it. I don't know what the hell happened. I went to a couple of machines and use the Windows wizard to configure the domain (right click My Computer, network settings) and re-joined the domain.

When I logged back in, a new user account was apperently created, and now is like every previous setting has been lost! What the hell did I do???

More information:

Everything was working fine untill I had to reinstall and reconfigure the server. The first time I set up the clients, I used the Connect Computer wizard of SBS 2003. This Wizard converted the local accounts (all of them administrators) into the domain accounts of my choice (created in the server). This wizar migrated all the account settings, and set up Outlook 2003 and IE.

Now, since I had to reconfigure everything, and didn't have access to client computers, as Genx87 suggested I rejoined the client computers to the domain.

I used the Windows wizard to do this, but the wizard apparently created a new account and resetted everything. Now Outlook doesn't work at all, and I don't know what the hell to do next.

Please help!

 

[Genx87]

I only played around with SBS 2003 until I realized the packaged crap they put into it is harder to work with than the standard tools hehe. Plus it didnt play nice with the SBS 2000 server on the network. I returned it and got straight server + exchange 03.

Anyways back to your issue. When you were logging into the clients was it from a local account? Now when you are logging in on the client is it from a domain account?

The only time I have ever seen local accounts be converted is when you turn a stand alone server into an AD controller. But maybe SBS 2003 is different?

One thing to try is to not use the SBS 03 computer wizard and simply make the computer account and join the domain. I dont know why the wizard would turn local accounts into domain accounts on a client machine. You need at least 1 local admin account in case of emergencies.

 

[Zucarita9000]

Yeah, I also found pretty strange that SBS "converted" the local accounts.

It seems that after using the Windows wizard to rejoined the domain, a new user account was created, and now I cannot go back to the way it was beforein order to export the settings and import them back into the new account.

 

[KLin]

Originally posted by: Zucarita9000
Yeah, I also found pretty strange that SBS "converted" the local accounts.

It seems that after using the Windows wizard to rejoined the domain, a new user account was created, and now I cannot go back to the way it was beforein order to export the settings and import them back into the new account.

It sounds like it created a new local profile on the PC itself. check c:\documents and settings on the PC's to see if there's a new profile.

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: KLin

Originally posted by: Zucarita9000
Yeah, I also found pretty strange that SBS "converted" the local accounts.

It seems that after using the Windows wizard to rejoined the domain, a new user account was created, and now I cannot go back to the way it was beforein order to export the settings and import them back into the new account.

It sounds like it created a new local profile on the PC itself. check c:\documents and settings on the PC's to see if there's a new profile.

Yes, I belive it did. Before doing this, this is how the client PCs were configured:

Before joining the domain (the 1st time), there was an "Administrator" account, and the settings were stored in the "Administrator" folder in the Documents and Settings directory.

When I use the SBS 2003 Connect Computer Wizard, it "converted" the Administrator account into the domain account I specified (i.e. jsmith). From then on, the user logged in as "jsmith" and had access to his settings, such as wallpaper, favourites, etc. These setting were still located in the "Administrator" directory, there was no "jsmith" directory.

Ever since I run the local Winzard to reconnect the client PC to the domain, a new user account was created. The account settings are stored in the "jsmith" folder. So yes, a new account was added.

MY question is, how do I import the previous settings to the new one?

 

[Czar]

right click on my computer / properties .. somewhere there is a profile button, there you can see all the profiles on the computer.. .you can then copy the profile to another folder

for example

c:\documents and settings\user1.olddomain
c:\documents and settings\user1.newdomain

these should exist.. copy the old domain user over the new domain user

and remember.. do not copy it to
c:\documents and settings

that will remove every single folder in that folder and replace it with the one you just copied, loosing every profile there... done it once... not pretty

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Czar
right click on my computer / properties .. somewhere there is a profile button, there you can see all the profiles on the computer.. .you can then copy the profile to another folder

for example

c:\documents and settings\user1.olddomain
c:\documents and settings\user1.newdomain

these should exist.. copy the old domain user over the new domain user

and remember.. do not copy it to
c:\documents and settings

that will remove every single folder in that folder and replace it with the one you just copied, loosing every profile there... done it once... not pretty

Thanks a lot, will try that.... keep sending suggestions please.

 

[Zucarita9000]

UPDATE.

I believe I have isolated the problem, and this is what happend. Please bear with me with the series of unfortunate events:

1. Before the new network was set up, every computer had a local account, most of them Admins. For instance, a PC had an account named "John Smith" wich was mapped to a folder named "John Smith" in the Documents and Settings directory.

2. After the installation of the server and the domain-based network, I run the Connect Computer Wizard that comes with Windows Small Business Server 2003, as suggested in the User's Guide.

What this wizard did was "convert" the local accounts into domain accounts, so the new user used the settings from the previous local user, i.e.:

Before: User "John Smith" loads the "John Smith" directory
After: User "jsmith" loads the same "John Smith" directory

This was an advantage because it made the move pretty straightforward. However, the big problem started when I had to re-install and re-configure the server, so:

3. After installing the server and creating the domain, users and computers (using the same ones that were previously configured), client computers logged in just fine, but something was off: Noone -including me- could access other client PCs on the network.

As some people suggested, I had to re-join the computers to the domian, even though the user names and computer names had not changed.

Anyways, I went to My Computer, Network Settings and used the Windows Wizard to configure the network settings, as I figured would be quick and pretty easy.

I was wrong.

The wizard completed the operation just fine, but after rebooting and log in, I noticed that the user settings had been lost.

After a few hours of heavy head-scratching I realized what had gone wrong: Windows had created a new, empty profile using the domain user name as the directory, so now when "jsmith" logs in, Windows no longer loads the "John Smith" directory with all the settings, instead it load the new, empty "jsmith" directory.

Everything is still there in the "John Smith" folder, now I only have to figure out how to move it to the new "jsmith" folder.

I can't simply just copy it, as Windows refuses to do so stating that it cannot copy some crap files like "index.dat" or some other crap.

So I was wondering if deleting "jsmith" and renaming "John Smith" to "jsmith" would do the trick.

Oh, FYE, the two PCs I wrecked are running Windows 2000 SP4.

Well, at least I learned something from this experience. Always, always backup your user profile.

 

[Czar]

erm
dont use explorer to copy the profiles, when you are viewing the profiles in the righclickmycompuyter/properties/profilesorsomething there is a button there called copy to which just copies the data from the profile and not the id's like index.dat or whatever they were called

should work better that way

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Czar
erm
dont use explorer to copy the profiles, when you are viewing the profiles in the righclickmycompuyter/properties/profilesorsomething there is a button there called copy to which just copies the data from the profile and not the id's like index.dat or whatever they were called

should work better that way

Yes, except that the button is greyed out. Something must have been screwed up, so I need another way.

 

[Czar]

ah
... I see, odd
can you browse the profiles in explorer?

 

[Zucarita9000]

Originally posted by: Czar
ah
... I see, odd
can you browse the profiles in explorer?

Yes, no problems with that. Is there a specific set of files that I can copy?

 

[Zucarita9000]

Any ideas?

 

[GeekDrew]

Make a full backup of Documents and Settings, and then try your idea of deleting the new profile, and renaming the old one to the new name? I'm fairly certain you'll wind up with quite a few errors, though, as the registry hives in that profile probably won't be pointing to the correct location for file paths, if anything was dumb enough to use a full path instead of an environmental path. Hrmmmm...

Out of curiosity, what is it in the old profiles that is so crucial that it must be saved? It looks as though you were able to reimport everyone's mail into the Exchange server, so that shouldn't be an issue... :-\

 

[Czar]

I think it would be best to recreate the profiles and copy their favorites, my documents and maybe some pst files if there are any