Offline Address Book not updating

[Rearview]

I think I may have other, related problems, but the most annoying thing at this point is that my Offline Address Book is not updating. I inherited this Exchange site when I took this job about a month ago. I've used Exchange 2007 before. I've tried everything I can find on the Web and no results yet.

I have one front-end server, and two mailbox servers running as a failover cluster. Through OWA, or not running in caches mode, people see my address list fine. In cached mode, new users (even myself) do not show up.

Also, when I run "Test-OutlookWebServices" from the Exchange Management Shell, I get a couple of errors. The names and IPs have been changed to protect the innocent, but "mul" is my front-end server, and "exchange" is my cluster name for the back end servers:

Id Type Message
-- ---- -------
1003 Information About to test AutoDiscover with the e-mail address (a valid address)
1006 Information The Autodiscover service was contacted at

https://mul.domain.com/Autodiscover/Autodiscover.xml.

1016 Success [EXCH]-Successfully contacted the AS service at

https://mul.domain.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.

The elapsed time was 171 milliseconds.
1015 Success [EXCH]-Successfully contacted the OAB service at

https://mul.domain.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx.

The elapsed time was 0 milliseconds.
1014 Success [EXCH]-Successfully contacted the UM service at

https://mul.domain.com/UnifiedMessaging/Service.asmx.

The elapsed time was 140 milliseconds.
1016 Information [EXPR]-The AS is not configured for this user.
1015 Success [EXPR]-Successfully contacted the OAB service at . The elapsed time was 0 milliseconds.
1014 Information [EXPR]-The UM is not configured for this user.
1013 Error When contacting

https://exchange.domain.com/Rpc

received the error Unable to connect to the remote server
1013 Error When contacting

https://exchange.domain.com/Rpc

received the error No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 192.168.145.50:443
1017 Error [EXPR]-Error when contacting the RPC/HTTP service at

https://exchange.domain.com/Rpc.

The elapsed time was 953 milliseconds.
1006 Success The Autodiscover service was tested successfully.
1021 Information The following web services generated errors....

 

[Cstorms]

Errors are related to your outlook anywhere if I remember correctly, if your not using it then you can disregard this (i assume the rpc VD isnt there or running when its disable, you also probably dont have the rpc over http component installed). The offline address book is a bear and a half, with crappy updating mechanisms. A quick google on the subject will bring you to a horde of people complaining about the same thing. You can attempt to manually update it via either the EMC or EMS, I had to restart the corresponding service a couple times after updating it, then have the end user close outlook and redownload it again.. In the end I just disabled it all together before rolling it out to the masses. Hopefully this will come around sometime in the near future. Good luck.

Cory

 

[Cstorms]

gah, it wont be running, its all one site in IIS..

dig through some technet if youre unclear, I am kind of shooting from the Sunday hip at the moment. Have a good day.

Cory

 

[Rearview]

Oh I have manually rebuilt the address list many times. It only takes about 1 second (is that a problem?) before it says it is finished. I've manually downloaded both the whole and incremental address list in Outlook numerous times over thee past several weeks. I've rebooted every server in the orginazation, I have added a registry key that I read would help, I just don't know what else to do. It's a real pain.

 

[cajuntank]

Have you tried to delete the OAB files on the local computer? This solved one of my issues early on, I also found where this worked for someone in the short term, but the link provided solved long term.

http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman/arch...-download-a-web-distribution-enabled-oab.aspx

You didn't mention about any errors in Outlook, but it has some good troubleshooting thoughts relating to your problem.

Hope I could help.

 

[Rearview]

No errors on the client side, they just don't see the new people in the address book (and in theory, they still see old people that should have been deleted).

I read that article, and it was informative, but not really what my problem is. I get event 1008 on my CAS, so it does appear that my address book is replicating from my back end servers to my front end server, it just seems that the back end server is not updating the address book. On my back end server, in the "Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ExchangeOAB" folder, there are two folders and nothing else. They are called something like 1acbbf14-8232-42e293.... etc. The "date modified" for each of them is March 20 and March 18, 2008.

 

[Rearview]

Update:

I deleted (moved, really) the two folders in my "ExchangeOAB" folder on the back end servers and rebuilt the address book. It created a new folder, but it is empty. *shrug*

 

[GuitarHead]

Hi - I'm having exactly the same issue. Did you ever find a solution?

 

[Rearview]

I did fix it. I wish I knew how. I tried so many things over the coarse of 2 days, and it started working the morning of the 3rd day. I have no idea which specific thing I did to make it work though. I wish I did know. The answer was out there and found while searching Google for error messages/codes. I wish I could help more.