Where I Was a Week Ago...

I managed to lose a week's worth of productivity. Last week I blew up my Exchange 2003 server. Fortunately for me, I was very early in the implementation, so I didn't have everyone breathing down my neck wondering when it would be fixed. The only actual email accounts impacted were mine and one of my co-workers.

After spending days on the phone with Microsoft, I eventually had to manually roll back the install and start from scratch. Fortunately I had a good backup of the data, so in the end neither of us lost any email... just a lot of time -- time explaining to my co-workers why my email address had changed, and the roughly 60 hours I needed to manually roll back the install and start from scratch. The whole experience was horribly frustrating and I'm glad that it's finally over. On the good side, the reinstall managed to fix some of the issues I'd been having elsewhere in the Exchange implementation project.

Within a couple of weeks, I should be ready to move the rest of my department to the new server, and shortly after that, the dominoes should start falling rapidly. By the end of the year I hope to be completely off of my NT4 domain and Exchange 5.5, and on to my Windows 2003 domain and Exchange 2003. Wish me luck.