The Public folder issue with the Exchange 2010 migration has been solved. An old lesson was reconfirmed. Then the chewing out of myself commenced.

Many years ago, when I was first learning to fix and build PC’s, I would go to the local monthly computer show. Each month would mean some new part for upgrading or replacing. It was fun to learn about these things, see what I could do with them, even cause the parts to eventually die out because of my own stupidity. It was a glorious time.

Eventually though I ran into a problem that took forever to solve. I had replaced something in my computer, and straightened up the cables connecting the PC to everything. I fired up the machine, and… no sound. Checked the settings in windows, checked the driver, pulled the card out, tried a different card, all still with no sound. 6 months I kept dealing with this problem, checked everything I could, tried new cards and still no sound. Well I checked almost everything I could. In month 6 of this issue, I went to do another cable cleanup, and that is when I found that I, for 6 months, had the microphone plugged into the speaker jack and the speakers plugged into the microphone jack. This was before they color coded everything, and for 6 months I swore that they were plugged in right. I assumed they were is more like it.

For many years I have told this tale to friends, and colleagues to exercise the point of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method. Always check and double check the simplest things before moving on to the more complex reasons. Sometimes though, even I need a swift kick in the rear to remember this.

I had been struggling this week with the public folder migration from Exchange 2007 to 2010. The Mailbox migration had worked fine. The public folders though had been beating me up. The hierarchy was not propagating, let alone the folders communicating. I did some research, and found that the replication was done over email, basically emailing the folders between servers. So I started checking SMTP settings, telnetting between machines, even remembered that there was a problem with mailboxes on the 2007 server sending e-mail to the mailboxes on the 2010 server, but not vice versa.

All the symptoms were there, right in my face as to the main portion of the answer. I still didn’t see the simple thing though, instead looking up every way I could think of describing the issue in Google, with no fix. Then, on day 4 of this madness, while starting to look at yet another site’s solution, the answer hit me in the face. I logged into the Domain Controller, opened up DNS, and yep, there it was. Actually, there it wasn’t. When I set up DNS for the new server, I had forgotten to put in an MX record for the new server. All they years of dealing with DNS and MX records, I had forgotten the simplest thing, yet for 3 day had assumed I had put it in. I was elated and angry with myself all at the same time, especially when I saw the hierarchy start to show up on the Exchange 2010 server (the rest of the solution was cleaning up the old security certs on the exchange 2007 server, and getting a new self signed cert on it).

So once again, I get reminded of the 6 months of no sound from the speakers, and why one really does need to double check the simplest things even more thoroughly than the complicated thing.