Short path issue with Exchange 2007
Hi All, We have installed the latest Exchange Server 2007 software (free download). We have observed that after installing Exchange Server 2007,the GetShortPathName() Win32 APIis not working. The GetShortPathName() API is returning the long path instead of the short path. We have even used the FileSystemObject from VB to do this but the result is same. What we can observe here is it is returning the long path name always and without returning any error values. We are facing a serious issues with this. Because our application that uses short paths is not working completely. Please help me. Regards, Mahesh
February 27th, 2007 3:38pm

Yes, that's true. ESE changed the log file names from 5 hex digits to 8 hex digits to support having more than a million log files, which is soemthing more and more customers were hitting, and it's a straightforward, but fairly painful operation to reset the log generation to zero (It requires a clean shutdown and deleting the logs. Easy, but it requires down time, and means that the old full backups can't be incrementally restored with the newer logs.). So the file names went from (e.g.) e01abcde.log to e01000abcde.log. From 8.3 to 11.3. 'So what?' you may ask? Well, the 8dot3 file name generation can slow things down considreably, especially when you have many similarly-named files in a directory. It also results in weird results. In the example below, `dir *8*` will return E0000000005.log -- a file which doesn't seem to have any eights in the name! So during setup, we set the registry key to disable 8.3 file name generation, effective on the next reboot.http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/121007(The creation of 8.3 filenames and directories for all long filenames and directories on NTFS partitions may decrease directory enumeration performance.) A few years ago when we were discussing moving to 11.3 names, I wrote a tool which just created many files, and the file creation did indeed slow down substantially. You can reenable the short file names with fsutil: `fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 0`. I believe it's only changed at setup time. ExBPA may also examine the value. Keep in mind that we don't test Exchange with short path generation on. I assume it will work, but at the same time I'd be concerned about something subtly strangehappening. Below is some output from `dir /x` on a lab machine before it was rebooted. The short filenames get strange quickly! How hard is it to just use the long file names? It is the year 2007... (Sorry, I couldn't resist. I do appreciate that changing something like that can be a LOT of work.) -martin E00000~1.LOG E0000000001.logE00000~2.LOG E0000000002.logE00000~3.LOG E0000000003.logE00000~4.LOG E0000000004.logE08565~1.LOG E0000000005.logE08965~1.LOG E0000000006.logE08D65~1.LOG E0000000007.logE08175~1.LOG E0000000008.logE08575~1.LOG E0000000009.logE08595~1.LOG E000000000A.logE08995~1.LOG E000000000B.logE08D95~1.LOG E000000000C.logE081A5~1.LOG E000000000D.logE085A5~1.LOG E000000000E.logE089A5~1.LOG E000000000F.logE0815F~1.LOG E0000000010.logE0855F~1.LOG E0000000011.logE0895F~1.LOG E0000000012.log
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March 10th, 2007 4:31am

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