Outlook clients can't get in, OWA works okay

[zephyran]

We had a strange problem this morning. The users at one of our sites could not log into their mailboxes using Outlook XP (they'd get the perpetual "Requesting information from Exchange server&quot. However, they could get in through OWA just fine. I had the same trouble connecting in from a remote site, but when I got onsite and tried Outlook, it worked fine. I checked with everyone that was having trouble, and they all got on fine as well.

We're running Exchange 5.5 SP4 on an NT4 SP6a domain controller. There are no indications in the Event logs of any problems, and the Exchange services were running fine (I did nothing other than log onto my machine and open Outlook). Antivirus didn't show any problems either.

Does anyone have any ideas what could have caused this to happen, and then to suddenly go away like it did?

 

[StackEngineer]

If the only problems are accessing Exchange from a remote site then it could be a routing issue. I'm assuming that the Exchange server is on a different subnet to the remote site and the two sites are connected via a router over a leased line. If this is the case you will need to give the Exchange server a gateway to the remote site - this would be the router that connects the two sites.

The web access will work probably because your webserver is connected to the other side of the router your Exchange server uses for internet access and so there is an existing route between the two servers - or they're both on the same LAN.

 

[zephyran]

No, most of the clients that were trying to get in were on the same subnet (separated only by Layer 2 switches). The remote site is connected with a VPN, and forwards all non-broadcast and non-multicast traffic between the sites.

I have one user that's had the problem for the past 2 days, while everybody else has been able to get in fine. I'm going to set the server to reboot tonight and see if that clears it up tomorrow. I'm also keeping an eye on network traffic, to see if there are any jabbering NICs tying up the server's connection.

 

[zephyran]

After I rebooted the server, the trouble cleared up. Guess I'll chalk this up to "when all else fails, reboot". Thanks, all!

 

[zephyran]

Update on this...

It happened again this morning. I stopped and restarted the Information Store service, and afterward everybody got in fine.

The only clue I see in the Event Log is Event ID 3 from Norton Antivirus saying "Scan started on all drives and all extensions". It must be from NAV Exchange because we're running Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition as the file system antivirus solution (which comes up as "Symantec Antivirus&quot.

The message above came at 9 AM, and the next message was 2 minutes later when I stopped the Information Store. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

 

[bobbys9]

Had a similar one. Running Symantec Corporate on my exchange 5.5 server. Set it up to exclude the mdb and other directories on c: and d:. Directories on e:, however, were not excluded, were scanned and ended up in quarantine. A restart caused a new mbd to be created, but MTA would not start. Renamed that, restored the 30 transaction logs, and the mdb. Took care of the problem.