• Microsoft Exchange Server,  Windows Server

    Defragment and Repair Exchange Information Stores

    An Exchange Information Store is a database. A Standard Exchange Server can host 3 Information Store databases. Each is a Jet database and can exist at its own file path and will have a .edb file extension. You can manually defrag an Exchange database using a tool called eseutil. In this case, you’ll encounter from 5 to 20 minutes of downtime per gig of the Information Store. You can run eseutil, Eseutil can be run to scan a database to determine whether an offline defragmentation is necessary. You can run eseutil to manually determine the space that could be saved with a defrag. To do so, run eseutil with the…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Recovering Open Directory Databases

    Every now and then I see an Open Directory database that’s gotten corrupt for one reason or another. To be more specific, while I see Kerberos get wonky and password server issues from time to time, every now and then I see the actual LDAP database throw errors like this one, when checked with slapd: /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt Corruption usually looks a little something like this: 51890ba0 ldif_read_file: checksum error on "/var/db/openldap/openldap-data/cn.bdb" 51890ba0 bdb_monitor_db_open: monitoring disabled; configure monitor database to enable config file testing succeeded If the bdb (Berkeley Database) files can’t be read in properly then you can do a sanity check with slaptest to see if there are other…

  • Xsan

    Xsan: Fragmentation

    Xsan volumes can get fragmented.  This can cause the performance to move to a grinding halt.  Dropped frames, slow copy times, even volume corruption are common side effects.  So, to defrag the volume you can use snfsdefrag.  This command-line tool will defrag volumes or files.  You can even specify what to do with the fragmented data, giving you a way to move data between storage pools…