Unity MWI extensions vanished!

[achillesva]

The other day, I used BulkEdit to change everyone's MWI extension to an "X". It worked fine for an entire day. I come in this morning and all the extensions are blank and "use MWI for message notification" is unchecked! This is for EVERYONE in Unity.

Now, we ran dirsynch last night to synch up our new active directory and our old Exchange GAL. Last time we did this, the MAPI Recipient attribute overwrote the "Allow Rich Text Formatting" property and set it to "0", so saweb admin could no longer see the subscribers at all.

Is there a property that could have been overwritten this time that is somehow related to the MWI's? If not, what could possibly have happened here?

[achillesva]

The plot thickens! I had one of our engineers free up custom attribute 12, which I believe to have been affected by dirsynch, thus shutting off the MWIs. I ran BulkEdit to change everyone's extensions back over to "X", and now I get an error: "(error) No MWI device found for this user." for each user! HELP! I just ran bulkedit successfully doing the SAME EXACT THING two days ago.

[achillesva]

I figured it out. The problem is that the "Use MWI for message notification" box is unchecked. Without it, BulkEdit can't enter any info. into the extension field. But BulkEdit offers no way to check that box! Any ideas?

[lindborg]

I'll add an option to check that box in BulkEdit - by default it's on, pretty unusual for it to have been turned off across the boards like that. Easy enough to adjust for in BulkEdit... I'll post it probably Monday night.

[lindborg]

Actually... I just dug into this and ran some tests... the "use MWI for message notification" is not a seperate flag. If there's any values in there at all then the flag is checked (including "X"). I just ran a test where I remove that flag from several subscribes and used BulkEdit to for it to "x" and everything worked smoothly... no changes needed to BulkEdit for this.

Reading back over your description - I'm not entirely sure I understand what you guys did with custom attribute #12 - It sounds to me like the MWI device was removed entirely (BulkEdit can't help you here - that's database corruption). If you pop open DOHPropTest (in \commserver\techtools) and open it without a password (just go ahead and open it in read only mode) you can check for this. Go to a "mail users" in the left column, then select a subscriber in the middle column and then select "AVP_NOTIFICATION_MWI" in the far right column. This should pop up a dilaog that contains exactly one entry that's named "MWI-1" - if it's empty (as I suspect it is) then your database is corrupted and you will have to delete and reimport these subscribers. If the MWI-1 device is there then it should be able to be set to an extension.

If it's there and you can set it via the SA but you cannot set it via the BulkEdit utility, I'll be shocked. The interfaces being used are identical. I'd also expect errors to crop up in the output for BulkEdit if the MWI device is missing...

[achillesva]

Hey Jeff, just checked everything with DOHPropTest. It's all MWI-1 as you said, no apparent corruption.

Here's how we fixed it: We had an old GAL dump to a .csv file with the old value for Custom Attr. 12 (before dirsync messed it up). So we massaged it a bit for each user, reimported it, then used BulkEdit to change all extensions back to "X". It worked.

Thanks!

[lindborg]

good news! I was a little woried there you had experienced a situation where custom attribute #12 had been wiped out and you couldn't get it back - there's a number of properties compressed into that field, MWI extension info is just one of them. Waxing that property across the boards would have caused some serious grief, good to hear you got things restored properly.