452 4.3.1 Insufficient System Resources – Continued Telnet Training

This is a problem that crops up fairly often if you have a lot of disparate Exchange servers out there without a solid monitoring solution in place. Very common for MSPs. Oh, and actually have somebody paying attention to those monitoring alerts. Nobody likes paying attention to monitoring alerts. There are reams of rules dedicated to keeping them out of sight in Outlook clients around the world. But that makes for an entirely separate topic/rant. The symptoms of this problem are that you’ll be getting reports from the end users that they don’t seem to be receiving any email, or at least any external email. But oddly enough sending out email is working just fine.

This is the point where a quick telnet test will focus you in on what is going on really fast. Continuing with what you learned from the post on Essential Exchange Troubleshooting – Send Email via Telnet you will want to telnet into the server from outside the organization. You may immediately get a response of:

452 4.3.1 Insufficient System Resources

But more likely you’ll receive a typical SMTP banner such as

220 myserver.contoso.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at Mon, 27 May 2013 08:19:44 -0700

If so then I recommend that you continue through with sending in an email via telnet. The next likely place that you’ll encounter this error is when you issue the RCPT TO: command to which you receive a response of

452 4.3.1 Insufficient System Resources

The fix for this is fairly simple. Check your Exchange server for low disk space usage on the partition where your queues reside, which will most likely be the partition with your Exchange installation. I find that most often what has eaten all of your space, in cases of single server Exchange 2007/2010 installations, is the IIS log files. When setting up your Exchange server it is a good idea to make sure that you have an archiving/recycling policy in place for your IIS logs to keep them from swallowing the entire partition over time. BES installations have the same problem as well with log files swallowing the drive.

The key phrase that you’ll want to keep in mind with this is “back pressure.” In a later post I’ll delve into this term.

More to the topic on hand, here’s an extra PowerShell fix for you to keep those IIS log files under control. It can also be easily customized for BES logs or other logging happy programs. Or even just keeping your temp files cleaned up regularly. You’ll want to set it to run as a scheduled task on a daily, weekly or monthly basis depending upon your organizations policies.

# CleanIISLogs.ps1
# Find and remove files older than $days
# Set $LogPath to where the IIS logs you want to recycle are kept
# 

$days = 31
$LogPath = C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1
# Find the target date
$startdate = Get-Date
$startdate = $startdate.AddDays(-$days)

# Clean the directory of log files older than the target date
Get-ChildItem -Path "$($LogPath)" -Recurse | where {$_.LastWriteTime -lt $startdate} | Remove-Item -Confirm:$false

Is this post helpful to you or is there something you would like me to go into greater detail on? Please let me know, thanks.