Monitoring Exchange 2000's routing service
To monitor the health and performance of your Exchange 2000 Server system, you need to monitor its routing service regularly. Two tools that can help you with this task are WinRoute and the Exchange 2000 Mail Queue Summary Web Page, which is better known as MailQ. Both tools are easy to understand and use.
About WinRoute
To determine how best to route messages, Exchange 2000 uses the Link State Algorithm (LSA), which is similar to the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) algorithm that IP network implementations use. Simply put, the OSPF algorithm lets routers calculate the shortest connection between nodes in a network for a message. The LSA uses the same concept, except the nodes are called routing groups and the connections are called connectors or links.
To calculate the best path for a message to take, the routing service uses information about the available routing groups and the state of the connectors (i.e., either up or down). In addition, the routing service uses restriction information, such as message-size restrictions. Exchange 2000 stores all this information in a Link State Table (LST). This table exists only in the memory on each server; Exchange 2000 never writes this table to disk.
You can view some of an LST's contents with Exchange System Manager (ESM). Although you can use ESM's Queue Viewer to view link queues and ESM's Monitoring and Status tool to view connector states, ESM doesn't have an option that lets you view a table in its entirety. Rather than obtain only some of the information piecemeal, you can use WinRoute to look at the entire LST for any Exchange server in your organization. You can even capture that information and save it to a file. WinRoute is an invaluable tool for environments with numerous routing groups and connectors.
Using WinRoute
WinRoute is on the Exchange 2000 CD-ROM in the \support\utils\i386 directory. To use WinRoute, you simply copy its executable to any subdirectory from which you want to run it. (You can also use an alternative method of installation. For information about this installation method, see the Microsoft article "XCON: How to Use the WinRoute Tool" at http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?id=kb;en-us;q281382.) You can run WinRoute from Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows 2000 Professional, and Win2K Advanced Server. (You can probably run WinRoute from XP Home Edition as well, but I haven't tested it with that OS.) After you launch the executable, the Server name dialog box, which Figure 1 shows, prompts you to enter the name of the server to which you want to connect. After you enter a name and click OK, WinRoute displays the LST associated with that server. WinRoute works by connecting to an Exchange 2000 server and identifying itself as another Exchange 2000 server in the same routing group. WinRoute then receives the LST as if it were a real Exchange 2000 server within the organization.
At this point, the LST consists of globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) representing the objects (e.g., server objects, connector objects) that the table contains. After WinRoute receives the GUIDs, it uses them to access Active Directory (AD) and retrieve the human-readable information associated with the GUIDs. Therefore, you need to run WinRoute from an Exchange Administrator account or another account that has full read permissions in the Exchange 2000 portion of AD's configuration naming context (NC).
If you're using WinRoute to examine data about Exchange servers outside your domain, you can bind to a specific directory server to assist with the resolution of the GUIDs. For example, you might need to provide this assistance if you're a consultant running WinRoute on your Win2K Pro laptop to check a customer's site or if you're an Exchange administrator traveling to different locations within your enterprise. To render resolution assistance, enter the server name, then click Bind Options in the Server name dialog box. In the Ldap Bind Options dialog box, which Figure 2 shows, enter the information needed to establish the appropriate Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) binding.
A major benefit of using WinRoute is that you can save the link state information to a file and send this file to Microsoft for review if you're having routing problems. You can also use the file to compare how ESM sees your configuration with the configuration that Exchange 2000's routing engine sees. The two should be the same.
The WinRoute display consists of three panes, as Figure 3 shows. The top pane arranges the information by routing group. Each routing group expands to show information about the routing group master, link state version number, routing group addresses, member servers, and connectors.