Seems there has been a large enough uproar from the IT community for Microsoft to announce intentions to support Exchange 2007 on the newly released Windows 2008 R2 OS in the near future.
“We always talk about listening to customers and sometimes this is written off by many as 'marketing speak'. In fact, we do take feedback seriously and no input is more important to our engineering processes than your voice.
Earlier this year we made a decision in one direction, and due to the feedback we have received on this blog and elsewhere, we have reconsidered. In the coming calendar year we will issue an update for Exchange 2007 enabling full support of Windows Server 2008 R2. We heard from many customers that this was important for streamlining their operations and reducing administrative challenges, so we have changed course and will add R2 support. We are still working through the specifics and will let you know once we have more to share on the timing of this update.
So, keep the feedback coming. We are listening. “
Kevin Allison
GM Exchange Customer Experience
Source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/04/453026.aspx
Recently, I had an enterprise customer who was experiencing intermittent and random slow logins across the network by users with Windows XP workstations on a Windows 2003 network. The customer had been fighting this issue for over 2 years and had allocated plenty of different resources towards it throughout that time frame.
Upon first diagnosing the issue, corrupt profiles, corrupt group policy objects, or even network infrastructure all came to mind. The first course of action was to actually find a user who was experiencing the issue with some regularity and to enable verbose logging for the user environment during logon.
To enable verbose logging of the user environment, you have make a registry change.
Insert warning about editing the windows registry and the potential harm it can cause nonsense here
Create a DWORD entry UserEnvDebugLevel at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon .
Set the value of UserEnvDebugLevel to 0x00000002 (hexidecimal)
For anyone who’s ever looked at a verbose log for the first time and tried to make sense of it, it might as well be written in ancient Sanskrit. Thankfully Microsoft’s Directory Services team has a great post about making sense of a verbose user environment log here: Understanding How to Read a Userenv Log
After reviewing the logs of a few login attempts, I ran across the infamous Failed to Impersonate User 5 error. This is a pretty common userenv error and can be extremely difficult to track down because it has so many causes. Possible causes are
- DNS Issues either with the DNS server itself or on the workstation (The most common culprit)
- Group policy issues with with permissions or file corruption
- Network communication between the workstation and active directory
- Flaky SPN for the computer
- Trust relationship between the computer and the domain
In the next part, I’ll go through the troubleshooting process.