 |
If you have specific questions that are not currently answered within the FAQs, please send an e-mail
to
L8support@lucid8.com and we will be happy to assist you. |
Tell me more about Microsoft’s ESEutil and ISinteg utilities.
Understanding the
difference between ESEutil and ISinteg is important. Running ESEutil is
like having a structural engineer check your house's foundation. The
engineer doesn't care what's inside the house. The engineer cares only
whether the underlying structure is sound. Running ISinteg is like
having an interior decorator come inside your house to check the way
you've laid out your furniture. The decorator doesn't care about the
house's foundation. The decorator cares only whether the rooms' layout
and decor meet with their approval.
Another way to look
at the difference between Eseutil and ISinteg is that;
ESEutil checks and fixes
individual database tables however it isn't concerned about the mail
data contained in an ESE database. ESEutil's job is to examine the
individual pages, check them for correctness by comparing a computed
checksum against a checksum stored in the page header, and verify that
each page's data is consistent.
ISinteg checks the mail
data itself in an ESE database and fixes the links between tables.
ISinteg and ESEutil aren't fundamentally dangerous, however using
these tools without foreknowledge of their capabilities and possible
effects is reckless at best. Each of these utilities operates
differently depending upon the version of Exchange that is in operation,
therefore if you are going to be upgrading to a newer version of
Exchange in the near future put some time aside to become affluent in
the newer command line parameters and rules surrounding each of these
utilities. Then again you could purchase GOexchange and
worry about more important things like sleep, time with your family,
your favorite hobby and all those personal things you haven't been able
to do for so long.
Before ever using any of these utilities on your production database we
strongly recommend that you setup a test environment and get comfortable
with the usage of each tool. You are mostly likely a very smart
and knowledgeable administrator, however we assume your human like the
rest of us and therefore mistakes can happen, especially during the day
when you have a million other things coming at you or at 3 in the
morning when your exhausted and just want to go home. The data
within your Exchange databases is extremely valuable and the utilities
listed here are very powerful, one wrong parameter and its all over.
ESEutil
ESEUTIL is Microsoft's utility for Exchange
that inspects and fixes the ESE
(Extensible Storage Engine)
layer of the database. Eseutil lets you perform different
functions using one of six modes: Defragmentation, Recovery, Integrity,
Dump, Repair, and Restore
Do you know how powerful (and dangerous) Exchange
Server's ESEUTIL can be?
To /p or not to /p
that is the question!
In all seriousness, below are two different
commands utilizing the /p parameter each of which can have very
different results on your database.
Using ESEutil /d /p
tells Eseutil to just build the new
database file in the new location, but do not copy it back over the
original database. This can be a very useful command depending on
the situation you're in.
Using ESEutil /p
evokes the hard repair
mode and in reality should be called DANGER MODE. Sometimes this mode is
the only way to fix a database however in 99.999999 percent of the cases
it should be avoided, except as a last resort on a dead database when
there's no backup available.
As you can see above one wrong placement of a parameter with
ESEutil and it can be a catastrophe. For a complete listing of the
ESEutil modes
click here.
After you figure out the appropriate usage of ESEutil you will also need
to keep up on the latest kb issues surrounding this utility. Click here to see
the First
150
>
ESEutil
related MS knowledge base articles for the last year
ISinteg
ISinteg's purpose is to inspect and fix the information store layer of
the database. ISinteg
looks at the mailboxes, public folders, and other parts of the IS,
checking for anything amiss. Again think of ISinteg as an interior
decorator that
comes inside your house to check the way you've laid out your furniture.,
ISinteg scans the tables and B-trees that organize the ESE pages into
their logical structures. In addition, the tool looks for orphaned
objects, objects that have incorrect values, or impossible references.
Because
ISINTEG focuses on the logical level rather than physical database
structure, it can repair and recover data that ESEUTIL can't. When
looking at the physical database level, ESEUTIL might find the data to
be valid because it looks for things such as page integrity and B-Tree
structure. Data that appears valid to ESEUTIL from a physical view of
the database might not be valid from a logical view. For example, data
for various IS tables like the message, folder, or attachments
table may be intact, but the relationships among tables or records
within tables may be broken or incorrect because of corruption in the
logical structure. This corruption can render the database unusable.
Logical
corruption of your Exchange Server databases is problematic and much
more difficult to diagnose and repair than physical corruption. The user
and administrator are typically unaware of a logical corruption
occurrence. To make matters worse, Exchange Server contains no built-in
checking (like that available for physical corruption) to diagnose and
alert you about logical database corruption. No specific symptoms
identify logical corruption.
Often, when an administrator discovers
the logical corruption, it's too late for repair.
For a complete listing
of the ISinteg modes
click here.
After you figure out the appropriate usage of ISinteg you will also need
to keep up on the latest kb issues surrounding this utility. Click
here to see the
First 150
>
ISinteg
related MS knowledge base articles for the last year
|
Contact Us
Print
Page