Seems pretty typical to me. While I know there are many people who store PSTs on the network and "never had a problem", I'm one of those people that have seen them corrupted many times. Also, the performance across the network sux.
You see "local techs" (that is, a tech at a customer) do this for one desktop user and it seems to work OK. Therefore, they assume by induction that it's going to work for EVERYBODY. And, of course, it doesn't. Not for long. C'est la guerre. Regards, Michael B. Smith MCSE/Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com -----Original Message----- From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:56 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Re: Hump day story (or how NOT to do Exchg/Outlk) Laugh, cry, go blind - I don't know which to choose. Wow. On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Jason Gurtz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yup, there are more people that need to come here and find out how it's > supposed to be done ;) The OP of the thread (a portion of which you see > below) was trying to figure out a way to prove to I.T. staff how the > network was not at fault for the CEO's slow email. > > ~JasonG > > -- > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Justin Shore > Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 01:42 [Yea I'm a bit behind ;)] > To: Nathan > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Prove it's not the network! > > Nathan wrote: > >> Proceed by elimination. If there is someone else in the office (I >> suppose the T1 is not just for one person) whose Outlook is *not* >> slow, and especially if "someone else" can be extended to "everybody >> else" then the problem is not the network. >> >> Outlook can have severe speed/response problems when not kept healthy; >> most notably there's something called PST files that have to be kept >> at a reasonable size, or re-indexed or something, and people who like >> to keep all their mail tend to run into that. > > Here's a long account of a similar battle over PSTs that I fought. > > I fought a 'blame-the-network' battle at a customer's site a couple > years ago. We built a brand-new GigE greenfield network in a new > building and help the customer move into their new digs. Shortly > thereafter a certain group of users started complaining that their > computers were horribly slow, most especially Outlook. This reached > upper management before it came back down to us contractors so it was a > huge deal when it landed at our feet. > > First thing we did was narrow down exactly who had the problem and who > didn't. 95% of the complaints were "me too!" complaints and weren't > legitimate. The remaining 5% were isolated to one group of users in one > specific area of the new building. Their IT staff that was working on > this problem with us immediately blamed us again because "it had to be > the network's fault because all the users are in the same physical > vicinity". I showed them graph after graph of the network I/O from the > Exchange servers through the core and down through the uplinks to > distribution. In the end we ended up graphing every affected users' > port. The graphs did not help; we were still to blame. > > Finally one day I sat down with the squeakiest user and had her show me > exactly what was slow and the steps she took to make that happen from > minute 1 of her walking into her office. I had her shut down and start > from a cold boot. She commented that the login process was faster than > normal and asked what I'd done to fix it (grrr). She fired up Outlook > and I noticed that it was very slow. She said that it was faster than > normal. Finally Outlook came up and she started scrolling through her > email. She selected a message and waited 10 seconds or so for the > message to come up. Then she'd try to save the attachment to the > desktop and it would take 4-5 minutes (for a 20MB attachment). She > continued on with her daily routine and started scrolling down there her > Outlook folders. I stopped her when I saw "Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc" > scroll by more than once. This was the sign I was looking for. I took > the wheel at this point and started counting. She had 8 (count them, > EIGHT) sets of default Outlook folders because she had 8 PSTs mounted in > Outlook. She explained that she hits the Exchange PST hard limit of 2GB > every 8-10 months. The company's IT folks would export everything to a > new PST to give her a fresh inbox. Then they'd mount it in Outlook so > she could have access to it (it was tax stuff so Legal wouldn't let her > delete anything, literally). I started hunting for the PSTs and found > them on an old file server, one that we had no idea was related to the > mail system. She was mounting 8 roughly 2GB PSTs across the network to > Outlook on a PC running XP w/ 128MB of RAM. Wonderful. > > But it gets better. I noticed that her inbox wasn't on the server but > was instead in a PST on the same file server and her email was set to > deliver to PST, not Exchange directly. In this situation the way > Exchange works, email is held on the server for PST users until they > bring their Outlook online. OL then downloads the queued up email and > stuffs it into the PST. Well, the PST was stored on the server so the > client would have to manipulate the PST on the server. > > Oh, but it gets better still. A few days later one of sys admins was > looking the newly discovered file server that was apparently critical to > the function of the mail server. From across the room we here loud > profanity and run over to see what happened. He discovered that the > idiot IT staff set up Windows to compress the non-RAIDed drive that > contains all the user PSTs and home directories because they ran low on > drive space about a year earlier. Before a user's OL client can modify > the PST the server has to decompress the entire PST, then write the > changes for the client, and recompress the PST and then write it back to > disk. The server was a low-end MS box with 256MB of RAM with no RAID > and a backup that usually failed. Oh, and that sys admin also > discovered shortly thereafter that all of the users created in the past > year and a half were set to deliver to PST because of, you guessed it, > another drive space issue. Isn't that nice. > > All the users that reported this problem turned out to be users that > handled tax data and couldn't delete any email. That's why that group > of users all experienced the problem. Every single one of these users > were mounting 2-8 2GB PSTs across the network. Those that shutdown at > night would come in at 8am and fire up their computers. A couple dozen > different users would all try to pull down their PSTs from the > compressed file system of the poor server. So it wasn't the network's > fault. The network was running like a champ. The POS server put into > mission critical service by incompetent IT staff was to blame. We spent > weeks troubleshooting the problem and trying to convince management that > the network was fine. In the end I had to sit down with a user, watch > everything that they did and then analyze their steps to figure out what > was causing the problem. Oh, and the reason it was faster the day I > worked with her was because we did this mid-morning, not at 8am. Did > anyone ever apologize (even figuratively) to the network folks? Nope. > Of course not. > > > As a network engineer I've found that the vast majority of my job is > helping other people find their problems. The network seldom breaks and > when it does it's not subtle; it's catastrophic. Even highly skilled > technical people still blame the network when their stuff doesn't work > right (after all my network is just a bunch of tubes, right?). > Networking is like mysterious dark magic that no one seems to > understand. It's the gremlins on the wire that causes Windows to crash, > not poor programming and a lack of QA. Networking is simply not > understood by most people and it's human nature to fear and loathe what > they don't understand. To be able to do my job effectively I have to > know my shit and everyone elses' well enough to know how something works > when it inevitably breaks. Had I not come into networking with a > systems background and were I not a quick study under fire I would not > be good at what I do. Did something "suddenly" break that must have > been caused by the network maintenance I did last week? No, it's the > fact that it never worked to begin with and you never actually tested it > when you deployed it a year ago. It wasn't until a user tested it for > you that you became aware of the fact that it wasn't working. It just > happened to come a week after I did maintenance on an unrelated device > on an unrelated network. But I'm going to spend all morning sniffing > and decoding traffic to help you realize that this device off to the > side over here couldn't possibly be involved. *sigh* Story of my life. > > </OT RANT> > > Justin > > [Remainder Trimmed] > > ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ > ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ > ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~
