Friday, January 05, 2007

Lucky or unlucky?

This week's had a few, ahem, interesting moments.  As I've said I'm currently working on an Exchange 5.5. to 2003 migration, and that these are always interesting.
 
Well, to date, my experience of Microsoft's Active Directory Connector wizard (ADC) has been really good - it sets up the right connections, ensures continuity for users, and a peaceful time for IT.  Well not on this project.  Firstly it decided to synchronise to it's own server instead of the other server in the 5.5 world (the server names the client had chosen were very similar and a visual inspection failed to spot the wrong name!); and then it decided that we only need to do a 1-way update between a few of the sites. 
 
The latter problem did not show up until users from those sites were migrated (some 2 weeks after the ADC was set up - so 'apparently' after running OK over the Christmas period).  When these did show up, they were insidious faults, without obvious errors in the server logs, and complicated by a great bunch of errors on one of the old servers that appeared to be mis-deliveries but were in fact 'mailbox full' symptoms.
 
So to the question - was I lucky in the past in that the ADC did the right things and just worked (so that I had not had to learn a load of investigative skills), or unlucky in that I never had to learn those skills before?
 
Thanks Microsoft!

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