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I have not been lucky enough to avoid this message whenever uninstalling any Exchange 2003 installation. There are multiple ways/options to find out the culprits, however following is what always worked for me.

Open ADUC, Select the domain and click on Find.

In the Find Window, choose Custom Search in Find option, click on Advanced and use the following query.

(msExchHomeServerName=/O=YourExchangeOrgName/OU=YourAdminGroupName
/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=YourExchangeServerName)(objectClass=User)

Hope this Helps.

If you are stuck with the IP conflict issues on your network, you can try using this feature of Windows DHCP. If you plan and manage your network properly this might not be needed. It is not recommended unless there is no choice as it puts the load on DHCP server and also increases the delay in IP address issuing process.

To enable this, Open DHCP Management console, Right click on the server and click properties (In Windows Server 2003), click on Advanced tab and enter a value in Conflict Detection attempts options. By default it is 0, it is recommended to not have it more than 2.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737924(WS.10).aspx

In Windows 2008 R2, you need to expand DHCP server and the right click on IPV4 to get to this option.

This post showcase the installation of Active Directory on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. As the name of the post suggests, there is no additional information (planning, designing etc. etc.), just the steps to promote a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine to a domain controller. Enjoy!

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition is installed.

2. Login with the local administrator. Configure the Network, Time Zone, Activate Windows, Widows Updates, Antivirus and other basic configurations you want to perform.

3. Provide the name you want your domain controller to have.

4. Select Roles in Server Manager and Click on Add Roles.

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Some Important points about DAG to get you started:

DAG can have an incremental deployment, which means, you can have a highly available deployment even if initially you have installed the standalone mailbox servers. However, if you plan to do so, make sure that you are using Enterprise edition of Windows Server 2008 because DAG uses Windows Failover clustering in the backend.

DAG can comprise of maximum 16 mailbox servers hence there can be a maximum of 16 database copies across DAG.

DAG can span across Active Directory sites (physical locations).

DAG uses TCP socket (not SMB) to replicate logs hence it is possible to customize the port for DAG replication and compress the log shipping.

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