Wednesday, January 13, 2010

SBS2008: Exchange 2007 stops receiving mails due to low disk space

Resolution
Move queue and queue transaction logs to another disk drive. Description here.


The path to find the answer
First i noticed that mails stopped comming in. Users were complaining about phonecalls from mailsenders that received an administrative mail saying that mails could not be delievered to the address of the exchange server. A quick look discovered lack of disk space. Though this Small Business Server 2008 did have a 60GB partition for the OS.
So then cleaning up the WSUS to only include updates from the actual OS on the clients (aprx. 30 client computers). Then using the cleanup tool (options/cleanup from WSUS server console) freed up 2 GB, wich was enough to let the server receive e-mails again.
Well, a few days later the error occured again. No mails received.
So i digged into the folder sizes using a small console app i build, just to get a list of folder sizes in 2.nd level of folder hierachi. Found winsxs and lost my breath.
Nearly 20GB of assembly files..... Windows side by side are reffered to many places, but it seems as moving the winsxs is not an option.
Back to business: noticed that it the mail stopped comming in when the size was less then 1.5GB. Odd. 'Cause no services stopped. BUT the queues for the Edge Transport didn't have enought space to receive further mails and messages for processing.
So searching for "move queue exchange 2007" came up with the result in the beginning of this post.