When you are running Microsoft Exchange Server and doing a recovery of data
while off the network, you can significantly decrease the startup time of
the Exchange directory by using a HOSTS file.
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An Exchange Server computer must sometimes be taken off the network to
recover data from the directory or information store. When the Exchange
directory starts, it tries to communicate with every other servers in the
site by host name. If DNS, WINS, and LMHOSTS files are all in place, each
name resolution method must time out multiple times. If DNS, WINS, and
LMHOSTS are not in place, the server attempts to broadcast each host name
for resolution. However, if a HOSTS file is used and points every host name
to the recovery server's loopback IP address, the IP connection is established immediately and fails on the RPC connection. This circumvents the server's attempting to contact the host in any other fashion
and significantly cut down the directory startup time.
An off-network recovery occurs when the Exchange Server computer is taken
off the regular corporate network to recover individual data in the
directory, private information store, or public information store. A couple
of examples of this would be to export required fields of the directory to
a CSV file, or to extract permissions (ACLs) from a public folder.
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