Cannot VPN into Exchange

[lodoss24]

I have road runner cable, I connect the cisco VPN software and I can access the companys shared drives. Access the interal intranet. What I cant do is connect the Exchange server through outlook. I can connect to it through the web access. I can ping the server name in dos and can ping the private IP in dos. So I know I can see it. I try to connect in Outlook, and it immediatly comes up with Network problems ..

 

[WhlfnShow]

Does the firewall have the appropriate ports open for email.

 

[lodoss24]

The company has several different remote locations. Everyone uses the Cisco VPN to connect to the domain, and everyone connects to the same exchange server. So naturally most of the users have no problems. I ask the MIS department if it was a firewall problem they said not likely, or other users would have be having the same issue. The MIS team has unable to figure out why I cannot connect. They said they have another user using aT&T cable with a similar issue. They can ping the exchange server but OUTLOOK refuses to see it.

 

[rstockton]

This is foggy, and I could be wrong, but....

..I recall during Outlook 97/98, if you had netbeui enabled, Outlook would first attempt to use that to communicate w/Exchange before using TCP/IP. After a while it would connect. I wonder if that is the case here and the firewall policy is blocking the netbeui (assuming it's being encapsulated and routed by IP). Look into your net neighbourhood properties and remove netb (and anything else but TCP/IP) and see if that fixes things. If this is the case, but you do require those other protocols there's a reg-hack that sets the order. I'm not sure if Outlook 2000/2002 uses similar binding orders or not.

I could be way off on this, but, hey, you never know

 

[MitchCumstein]

Can you ping by name, or only by IP address? Can't hurt to add the mail server to your local lmhosts file

 

[lodoss24]

hmmm.. thats a really good idea. Cause I can ping the name and the IP, and I have added it to the HOST file. Also Internet Explorer finds our intranet site. It just seems that Outlook doesn't even want to look for the connection. Ill give that a try right away!

Yippie that might fix it

 

[dredogg]

Are the other VPN users using Outlook in corporate mode, or the other mode?
Or maybe they are using outlook express and think it is outlook?

Outlook2k(corp mode) uses a range, or 2 ranges of ports....I forget, it's been awhile since I dealt with that. You can find which ports on MS KB.

The MIS guys probably jsut opened pop3, smtp, and maybe imap4.

try Outlook express

 

[walxom]

lodoss, you need to add entries to your host file. Outlook is sort of dumb in that way because it doesnt know how to distinguish your VPN address from your local ip address. Simply add the local ip of your exch server and it's netbios name.

 

[Norwich]

Outlook (certainly the older versions) has a fixed order for name resolution protocols (WINS DNS hosts etc) rather than using the systems defaults. I forget which method is used in which order but there is the situation where the first few methods time out (rather than fail immediately) which makes the outlook connection to the exchange server time out itself before the appropriate resolution method is used.

I recall there may be a registry hack to change outlook's name resolution order but the quickest test is to change the outlook exchange service profile to use the exchange server's IP address rather than it's name.

 

[bp1169]

We had the same problem here. Make sure you are using the latest VPN client 3.5.x, and run the setmtu.exe file that is included with the client. The mtu for your connection should be set to 1400, per recommendations from Cisco's website. Exchange likes to send large packets thereby causing fragmented packets to be encapsulated in new frames and will cause excessive overhead for the connection,sometimes outlook will timeout as a result. Hope this helps.

For more info see

http://forums.cisco.com/eforum/serv...display_location&mode=new&location=.ee79015/2

 

[lodoss24]

Thank you for all your help. I gave all these notes to the IT guy, and he was pretty excited about it. He had been working on this issue for quite sometime and this is what ended up solving it or a combonation of things. First he did rid of any Netbeui or Netbois, added a LMHOST entry, and staticly assinged the WINS, also he found that there was a second LAN Ethernet adaptor, after running IPCONFIG, and that IP address was 10.0.0.1 he changed that to 192.168.x.x and Outlook can now see the server. Im not sure what his exact explantion was, but the way the VPN was trying to access Netbios names or something.

Thanks you again, for all the assitance