I was having insurmountable problems trying to install Exchange 2013 SP1 on a production 2008 R2 SP1 server for a customer. So eventually I gave up and tried to install it on an existing virtual W2K8 R2 server running on a VMWare box in my lab. When that failed, I created a brand new VM, installed W2K8 R2 SP1 and then installed Exchange 2013 SP1 on there and FINALLY a working system. SO now exchange is working, at least in as much as I can run the EAC.
I then discovered some further problems. I had installed an Exchange Server many years ago, as a trial, and while that server is long gone and using ADSI Edit I had removed the Exchange values from my AD, lo and behold there are some "mailboxes" left over. However, these mailboxes can't be deleted because "the object does not exist". This seems like a bizarre situation. How can a system enumerate items that don't exist? That just reeks of dreadful software design. A solution to that problem would be appreciated.
But the main problem I have is probably far simpler, but I can't figure it out. The company I am doing this for is called, for the sake of argument, ACME. When I originally set up their AD they didn't have a registered domain name so I called it "acme.local". And now I have all the users in that domain. When they got email, and hence a domain name, let's call it acme.com, they used Outlook to access POP accounts on an external server. Now I want to set up exchange. But the AD only knows about acme.local but exchange seems to demand that the AD has a domain acme.com.
One possible solution would be to rename the acme.local domain to acme.com but there doesn't appear to be a way of doing that using any of the RSATs. I can see where I can set up a "receive connector" and specify acme.com, but can I convince Exchange to deliver email addressed to user@acme.com to the AD user user@acme.local
If someone can point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful. I'm also open to suggestions on what is a good book to understand Exchange 2013. I find Microsoft documentation in general to be very confusing. They use English words but arranged in such a way that the meaning is totally obscured.
Thanks for reading.