Exchange and Outlook connection issues

[hmcgillem]

Over the weekend, I modified our MX records to reflect the proper "name" of our Exchange server. Rather than have a default mail.domain.com I changed it so that the MX server is servername.domain.com. Now, some of my remote users automatically come up with a "Disconnected" status when attempting to connect remotely. Also, some of my internal users are having this same issue. I'm thinking that there is a conflict between the name resolution. The A record associated with the MX record points to a public IP address and internally, users are trying to resolve the name to the internal IP Address. My thinking is that the workstations can't figure out which IP address to use and it's trying to connect to the public IP address rather than the private IP address. Any ideas on how I can resolve this issue? All workstations are set up to use an internal DNS server, and a public DNS server is set up as the secondary DNS server. Any thoughts?

 

[nsantin]

How are the remote users conecting? Via VPN? RPC or HTTPS? OWA?

Typcailly outlook will not use MX records, it will use the internal server DNS name (assuming you are using SMTP and not POP)

 

[hmcgillem]

They are connecting through VPN and then opening Outlook. The problem is that the Outlook profiles are directed to server.domain.com internally and the MX record also points to server.domain.com. I believe I have resolved the issue by updating my DHCP server to only issue an internal DNS server instead of both external and internal. I think Outlook is having problems resolving the server name to an internal IP address.

 

[pgaliardo]

So as Nsantin suggested it seems to be a DNS problem. If your DHCP server was giving out an external DNS server as the primary, that would definitely cause the problem. Outlook clients would query that server for your internal mail server name and of course, the external DNS would never return a result.

 

[hmcgillem]

Yeah, but I had my internal DNS server as the primary and an external DNS server as the secondary. I removed the external DNS server as the secondary leaving only the internal DNS server. I had no complaints of problems this morning since I made that change! So, I'm definitely thinking that a the couple of users internally who were having the problems were having the problems due to name resolution issues. However, I'm still not sure that my two remote users are fixed. I'm waiting to hear back from them. I tried to connect last night from home remotely and I had no problems at all. Very weird that it happens to various users instead of everyone!