Exchange 2003 Nightmare. RPC/HTTP & OWA Problems

[airforceixi]

OK, first off I just want to say that this is driving me completely insane because I can not get this to work the way I want it to work at ALL and to make matters worse, it's getting worse!

I'm running Exchange 2003 SP1 on Windows Server 2003 SP1. Connected to the Internet/LAN through a single connection shared by a router. The inside client computers connect to the exchange server just fine. I set up RPC over HTTP for outside client connections, but as the Microsoft instructions state to go to server/rpc, I am not capable of authenticating (enter user/pass, comes up again, 3-4 times) and gives me an error: "401.3 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to an ACL set on the requested resource." I tried a wide variety of things, and I don't even remember most of them, and none of them helped.

So, I decided to just skip on that for now and just check and see if everything else was working. OWA isn't working now. Users attempted to login (forms authentication) and all users come up with an error upon login: "400 - Bad Request."

... I give up ...

As the subject states: Exchange 2003 Nightmare.

Anybody have any ideas as to how I can fix these things? Thanks in advance.

-Rich

 

[airforceixi]

OK, skip the OWA error. I reinstalled the SP1 update and it works again. The RPC interface still doesn't work though.

 

[dmandell]

Have you checked the following?
In IIS service manager, open the default website and right click on the RPC virtual directory and select properties.

Click on Directory Security tab.
under Authentication and access control, hit the Edit button. Be sure that the box for Basic Authentication is ticked. If not, that might be your problem.

(click ok and click ok to all of the warnings.)

I hope this helps.
Dana

 

[dmandell]

BTW, also be sure your Outlook client is set for "basic authentication", not the default of NTLM.
Dana

 

[PuzzledUNIX]

Are you going through SSL on web access or not?. Check the firewall setting within SP1 for Win server 2003.

Keep us in the loop.
Sam,

 

[ilpadrino]

What about the domain? -- I believe RPC over HTTP requires a 2003 AD.