Interview Question for active directory and exchange

Mail Flow within organizations:	1. User sends mail to another user by using an exchange client.
	2. By using SMTP, the sender’s client submit this mail to the SMTP virtual server of home mailbox server.
	3. Then Exchange server looks up the recipient of the mail message to determine which server the recipients mailbox resides on.
	4. Now if the recipient is on same server, exchange delivers the message to recipient’s mailbox – But if the mailbox is on another server, the sender’s mailbox server sends that mail to recipeint’s mailbox server, and then it is the recipient’s mailbox server who delivers the mail to recipient mailbox.
Native Mode:	Where all servers are running Exchange 2000 or higher.
Mixed Mode:	Where Exchange 5.5 servers still exist.
Exchange Services:	1. Microsoft Exchange Information Store: This service manages the Microsoft Exchange Information Store, and makes mailbox stores and public folder stores available.
	2. Microsoft Exchange System Attendant: This service provides monitoring, maintenance, and Active Directory lookup services, for example (RUS, Recipient policy, Building offline Address book etc, , monitoring of services and connectors, defragmenting the Exchange store, and forwarding Active Directory lookups to a Global Catalog server.
	3. Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine: Provides topology and routing information to Exchange Server 2003 servers. If this service is stopped, optimal routing of messages will not be available.
	4. Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks: Provides Microsoft Exchange X.400 services. Exchange X.400 services are used for connecting to Exchange 5.5 servers, and by other connectors (custom gateways).
	5. Microsoft Exchange Management: Provides Exchange management information using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). If this service is stopped, Exchange management information is unavailable using WMI

Exchange Database files	Priv1.edb: A rich-text database file containing message headers, message text, and standard attachments.
	Priv1.stm: A streaming internet content file containing audio, video and other media that are formatted as streams of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) data
	Log Files (E0001.log – 5 MB files) – These are the log files which Microsoft Exchange Server uses for transaction and as a disaster recovery method that can bring a Exchange database back to a consistent state after a crash. Before anything is written to the EDB file, it is first written to a transaction log. Once the transaction has been logged, the data is written to the database when convenient
	Until a transaction is committed to the database, it is available from memory and recorded in the transaction logs. This is why you will see store.exe use up to 1GB of memory after the Exchange server has been in use for a while. After an Exchange server is brought back up after a crash, the checkpoint file points to the last committed transaction in the transaction logs which are then replayed from that point on. This form of write-ahead logging is important for you to know.