OWA and Exchange on separate machines

[Zelandakh]

NickBrice asked me:

I'm trying to get OWA to work and I have one Exchange server but I want to run OWA on the intranet server. So, Exchange is running fine as it is, IIS 4 is running fine on the intranet server, and the OWA entry page pops up fine when requested. Unfortuntely, when I try to login I get an Authentication error.
I think the problem is that I have not configured the intranet box to look at the Exchange server to retrieve mail/authenticate, and I can't find details on how to do this anywhere (IIS starts after this, and all the OWA
instructions I can find stop before really talking about installing OWA and Exchange in different places. It would be really helpful if you could point me to somewhere I can follow instructions step by step to find out where I have gone wrong.

 

[Zelandakh]

When you run OWA on an IIS computer that is not part of the Exchange server, you need to remember the same steps as for one computer, but apply the right parts to the right machine.

When you access the OWA you are in fact logging on locally to that computer. Hence, you need to create a "log on locally" group for the IIS server. Add in the users that are allowed to use OWA. Ensure it is a DC by the way.

The OWA installer (which you can get by doing a custom install of Exchange) should be run on the IIS computer and points to the Exchange server on the other DC.

You will need to run Exchange SP4 on the Exchange server to give you a good run at the OWA (it now works quite well!). Never looked at applying Exchange SP to the IIS server...

More later - problems abound here.

 

[majmojo]

I have used two references for OWA - Planning and Deploying Outlook Web Access and the Troubleshooting Guide for Outlook Web Access. I got both from the support.microsoft.com site. Both have been decent enough references. The former talks about deploying an OWA site in just the way you have it...as a matter of fact it recommends it.

mojo