One of our clients have had a problem over recent weeks, where for no visible reason, the exchange server would just stop working. At first they took it upon themselves to restart the server, and this would sort out the problem. Until the next night, when the same thing would happen.
Obviously, this daily restart is not the solution to the problem.
I took the time to setup proper monitoring on the Small Business Server, and finally found the event that was causing the exchange server to stop working. A silly, built-in limitation.
Exchange is by default configured to have a maximum, logical database size of 18GB, which for more than 10 users, is really not that much. From Exchange 2003 SP2, you can now configure the maximum size to be up to 75GB, which is a much better place to be, assuming you have the available disk space. In this client’s case, they do not have the disk space to go that high, so I’ve upped it to 25GB for now, and have asked the users to be a bit more vigilant in managing their mailboxes. If they can’t, I will…
The necessary steps to change the configuration can be found here