On the phone with Microsoft Support

This weekend marked my long awaited upgrade from Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003 at the office. I have been planning situation after situation and while I know it is not possible to cover every situation, I feel as though I have. So this morning finally came around and I got into the office at a cheery 9:00 AM and figured I would get a good jump on things ... After all between upgrading Exchange then upgrading and basically rebuilding our voice mail (Cisco Unity) connections with the email server, I was looking at a good 11–14 hours ahead of myself.

So I got into the office and got started on making sure the backup from the night before went off without a hitch, running the Cisco guidelines for the upgrade and made their backup (recommended a manual backup).  Then I got to step 5 on the Cisco instructions which state to install Exchange 2003 according to Microsoft Guidelines, no problem, right??

Well after spending a few hours of running into the same problem (but by the way, never once receiving an error message and the machine did not hang either), I decided it was time to get Microsoft on the line.  I called Microsoft and after trying a few dozen things, they are still on the phone … oh don’t forget to mention it has been 3 hours & 15 minutes SO FAR and my support guy just told me that it is getting near the end of his shift and basically he is going home, so someone else will be coming in to help me.  Well thanks a lot Aslam Shaikh, but the last 3 hours PLUS could have been spent much better than you stabbing in the dark and then saying, “let’s try it again, oh that didn’t work? well, let’s reboot”.  Finally we did bet the problem fixed, it was only 3 hours and 50 minutes and it was a solution that I suggested trying about 2 hours earlier!!  Let’s rename the Mailroot folder and let SMTP recreate it.

I may be able to write more later… 

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