ANN: ORF 5.1 Beta R1 - ORF Forums

We are happy to announce the first public preview of ORF 5.1, the first update to the highly appraised next generation of ORF.

The latest version features numerous improvements and tweaks, including

- Microsoft Exchange 2013 support
- IDNA support in the URL harvester engine
- Reverse DNS lookup in the ORF Log Viewer

Learn more and experience ORF 5.1 first-hand at:

http://vamsoft.com/beta

Thank you for testing ORF.

@Marco: Exchange 2013 does send a huge amount of email probes, these are the "inboundproxy" emails. However, these should have been detected by the the ORF Setup in your organization. If you open a command prompt as administrator and run "orfmexhelper -ghm" in the ORF directory, are all Health Mailbox addresses returned?

@Marco: Thank you. Well, that's odd -- we query the Health Monitoring mailbox addresses from Exchange itself. Just to rule out if there's some misunderstanding between Exchange and ORF, can you please run the following test?

1) Open the Exchange Management Console,
2) Run "Get-Mailbox -monitoring | fl"

This should return return at least a few health monitoring mailbox objects.

@NorbertFe: Yes, it will expire on July 1, 2013.

As for the upgrade order, I would recommend starting with the subscriber, but both instances must be down concurrently, because ORF 5.1 and ORF 5.0 remote communication protocols are not compatible with each other, so either both servers are 5.1, or you will get errors.

@Marco: Thank you, that certainly explains the issue. ORF detects the list of Health Monitoring mailboxes during installation, but in your case none turned up. I will check if I can dig something up regarding this Exchange issue, but I'm afraid there is little ORF can do in this regard.

ORF will read the list of HM email addresses from the registry -- I can tell you which key is it and you can populate the email addresses list on your own. Once the email addresses are there, ORF will skip reporting HM email probes. Let me know if you need that, I will give you the key name and instructions.

@Marco: Sorry for the delay. To make ORF ignore the Health Monitoring emails, do the following:

1) Compile a list of Health Monitoring mailbox SMTP addresses on your Exchange system manually.

2) Run 'regedit'.

3) Find the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Vamsoft\ExchangeHealthCheckMailboxes key. If it does not exist, create it.

4) Open the 'Addresses' value for editing. If there is no such value, create the value as 'Multi-String Value'.

5) Enter the list of SMTP addresses to the value, one address per line, e.g.


6) Save the value and close Regedit.

7) Restart the Exchange transport services. On a Client Access Server installation, the service to be restarted is MSExchangeFrontEndTransport. On a Mailbox Server installation, restart MSExchangeTransport. If you have a mixed installation with both roles, restart both services.

Alas, this is just a workaround and does not explain why Exchange Health Monitoring mailboxes show up as user mailboxes. If they were listed as Health mailbox, the ORF Setup would have done the above for you. My research resulted in little -- do you maybe have a link to the source that explains how it is an Exchange bug? The closest thing I've found is that Health Monitoring mailboxes may be part converted into user mailboxes if a retention policy is applied to them (http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/exchange-2013-health-mailboxes/ ). Also, have you applied CU1? It may have already fixed the issue.

@Marco: I guess there may be multiple ways how a Health Monitoring mailbox gets "converted into a user mailbox". We will keep an eye on this if it gets reported again.

@Josh C: So far we are aware of only one (minor) and that's with Exchange 2013 support. I would say the beta is pretty stable, but we do not officially recommend running beta releases in production environments.