June 5, 2008 at 12:04 pm
restore or create a database with 50 million rows or so
set up db mail
configure the db not to grow and make sure there is no free space left
run alter index with online = on
this should create a million or so emails that will bring MS Exchange to it's knees
June 5, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Probably not an appropriate response, given that you'll affect lots of people besides the admin.
June 5, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Been there, done that, albeit unknowingly. I used to have to send out contract updates when I was in the USAF. Had to send 'em out to folks all over the Air Force I did. After about the second wave of updates, the base Exchange administrators shot me an email asking of I could send in waves of 20-50 with about 30 minutes between. It was then I clue'ed in as to the impact I was having.
Of course, if I was the Exchange admin and a SQL Server DBA did this. Said DBA might find himself/herself sending an email promising to take the entire server staff out to lunch for the faux paus, with CCs to the appropriate managers. Don't mess with the folks who control your email!
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
June 5, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I had someone once tell me they wrote a VB4 app like this to page their manager every 10 minutes.
He didn't get the job.
June 6, 2008 at 6:37 am
some weekday humor, but we did crash our Exchange server twice with SQL
one time we wrote a cursor to kill an MS Access connection and email this. the other time we ran out of room on a table with 300 million rows. it sent almost a million emails, crashed email, i had to delete every email in the db mail queue because it was backlogged another million messages and my blackberry didn't work right for 2-3 weeks because everyone of the 600,000 some emails i did receive were forwarded to my blackberry. and it took me almost a week to figure out how to clean out my mailbox.
i use offline folders and the ost file got so big it froze MS Outlook. Trying to delete them all manually also froze outlook.
what i ended up doing is building a new PC and i set up an Outlook rule to move all those emails to deleted items. as the rule ran over a few days i used my laptop to empty my deleted items every few hours.
June 11, 2008 at 8:43 am
See, this is why I make making friends with the network admins and email admins my #1 priority when I start in a new company 😉 Well, right after my supervisor anyhow.
I have been to so many places where I can get stuff done just because I am good friends with "those" people, and other DBA's can't get anything done because they have not.
Never been fortunate enough to kill Exchange myself, but I was at one large, rather well known company to all of us on this site, when their Exchange melted down for about 3 days back in 1997. Interresting what happens when there is one email that goes out from random employee #1 to a group (that just happens to be for ALL employees) asking why they are in this group and if they could removed.
Then followed by 200 more people doing reply all asking the same thing.
Followed by 50 people doing reply all telling people to quit doing reply all.
Let's say there was 20,000 employees in the company at the time....
June 11, 2008 at 8:47 am
i remember when I Love You or Melissa hit around 1999. i was in the army and working for the command group of my unit. Our Italian Army liason told me he did something bad. i went up and saw that he had over 1000 emails in his outbox with the same subject. I just shut off his PC there and then, and the email system went down shortly after that.
there was this other time when the email admins changed the general's email address and never told anyone. The Aide told me to go talk to them because the Commander of US Army Europe sent our general an email and he didn't get an answer back within 20 minutes.
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