Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Exchange 5.5 Blues
Exchange would crash periodically due to disk space issues, which I finally resolved once and for all. Well, more accurately, for a more extended time.
Naturally I was surprised to be paged yesterday morning when the Exchange server barfed again. I had the manager reboot it, and then I tested to make sure it was processing mail afterward. A while later, I checked out the event logs for signs of what might have happened.
Why lo and behold, something new and completely different! The errors logged included:
Background thread FDoQuotaCheck halted due to error code 0xfaf.
Background thread FDoMaintenance halted due to error code 0xfaf.
Unexpected replication thread error 0xfaf.
FReplAgent
Er… ummm… okay then.
I found something potentially relevant on Exchange 2000, not 5.5, where there is a setting in the registry allocating thread memory. It should be set to 0 to make it unlimited. That setting does not exist for Exchange 5.5, but I naturally begin to wonder if the server needs more memory to handle the load it is under. It’s getting old, and has only 128 MB. I’m trying to nurse it along until next year, when I will be attempting to get them to replace everything.
Figured I’d toss this out here in case anyone has insight into the errors.