Ant Drewery

The company I work for has been bought by another and we are currently transitioning our IT systems. As part of this transition the users are being given mailboxes in the new organisation. Until the decommisioning of existing systems is complete some users have a need to access their original mailbox and public folders which they are achieving via Outlook Web Access.

The users working with public folders via OWA found that they could not reply or forward messages exceeding 2MB in size. A Google search returned this article which provided the solution.

On each front-end server the following registry entry needs to be created: 

Location: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWeb\OWA
Value: maxPFReplyForwardSize
Type: REG_DWORD
Value Data: X

Where X is the maximum size you want to set in kilobytes (remembering to set the base to decimal).

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2003, OWA, Outlook Web Access

I was working on a Small Business Server 2003 system at the weekend. My first job of the day was to install the latest security patches then reboot. Unfortunately after the reboot the server had dropped off the network and the IPSec Services service had failed to start. Manually trying to start it resulted in "The system cannot find the file specified". I tried another reboot for good measure but got the same result. I then disabled the service and rebooted. The server stayed on the network but components like Sharepoint and OWA would not work.

My initial suspicion was that this was caused by one of the security patches I had applied so I uninstalled them one at a time trying to find which was the culprit. However, after they all had been removed the issue still persisted. A bit of Googling the event logs showed that the IPSec Services were entering "block mode" and led me to the solution to my problem with this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=912023. It seems that there was a corrupted file in the policy store. After resolving the issue I reapplied the security patches without any trouble.