LiveArchive: Why? Where? How?

I’m going to address an age old question from folks that do not like to read our feature pages, in hopes that you read this blog. As part of the DR (Disaster Recovery) we have two primary items that can help during and after an outage. This post will help educate your teams on the expectation of how things work, so your expectations as well as your clients are managed to the correct level.

During an outage

During an outage the best place to have surefire access is to type https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com into your browser. This is the sure fire way to ensure that regardless of which cluster is live (Dallas or Los Angeles) your clients can get to it. A best practice is having a shortcut ready for your clients on their Desktop or Start Menu. If I had a penny for each time that someone’s server catches fire and it’s that juncture that a tech asks “How do I get to LiveArchive?”. You are already putting yourself in front of the barrel. If you don’t have a solution in hand and you have to “call someone else”, it’s that point that your client’s confidence starts eroding.

Where is LiveArchive?

LiveArchive is located at  https://livearchive.exchangedefender.com

What are my LiveArchive credentials?

Your LiveArchive credentials are the same as your ExchangeDefender credentials; which are your email address and your ExchangeDefender password.  Remember if you forgot this password and your email is down your best bet in an outage scenario is to open a ticket for your client in our portal and request their passwords. Sadly, folks often try their email passwords and assume that something is wrong (see above: more erosion). The key to all of this is to get the right answer on the first try.

So let’s move forward, now you either knew everything above upfront and only have to deal with your end users once or you had to go back and forth a few times to get it hammered out. Regardless, your clients have access to all of their internet mail now, now your hard job starts. Get the defibrillator and resurrect their Exchange server, obviously this can range from a simple reboot to a week long pain staking process. One thing you have in the back of your mind is, thank goodness ExchangeDefender is holding all of my mail. The most important thing to remember while you and your team are doing your best to perform thoracic surgery to the server is make sure the server is offline!!

Here’s why, by RFC rules we can only hold mail that is being deferred by your server. If your server is online and “REJECTING” mail due to bad configuration or your troubleshooting, all that mail is purged because your client’s server is telling our software this is permanent rejection. This is the biggest key in the process, luckily this doesn’t happen often but there are teams that will have the server permanently rejecting mail for a week and then ask for their mail. And even though this is digging yourself a grave, we MAY still be able to help you.

First off our Mail “Spooling” or “Bagging” service is in place for up to 7 days. The way it works is, after the initial real-time attempt to deliver your mail, your mail is moved to a retry queue. This queue in an effort to not hammer client servers reattempts to deliver from each node every 20 minutes or so, staggered. This process is fully automated and constantly running, you don’t have to call us or open a ticket saying, “Our server is up release our mail”. If your server really is up and accepting mail from our servers your mail will start to flow on its own, but it can take up to a couple of hours for all of your mail to deliver depending on your queued volume. Again, we don’t want to pound your client’s server into submission and cause it to trigger the Exchange backpressure mechanism.

Now, if you made the unfortunate mistake to bring back a server online after rebuild without the process IP restrictions and anonymous delivery settings and all of your spool was lost there is still one possibility. If the mail is in LiveArchive, due to our hub and transport design you can actually forward all that mail to your individual client’s mailboxes one by one. This is a fully manual process that can is pretty time consuming but when faced with the choice of telling a client you lost all their mail for the past x number of days or telling them you need a couple more hours to make them whole, the choice becomes easy.

Carlos Lascano
VP Support Services, ExchangeDefender
carlos@ownwebnow.com
(877) 546-0316 x737