The weirdest thing has happen over

[mcship]

The weirdest thing has happen over the past couple of weeks. Suddenly out of the blue I have about 75% of my Exchange users suddenly lose site of the internal Exchange server. Some of my end users suddenly have the retry or work offline message when they launch Outlook 2000. They can select retry and for the most part they get access to their email, it's slow but they got access. Some users hit retry several times and never got through. This basically tells me that these machines can no longer see the exchange server by name, why that suddenly change I don't know. So with that I modified the LMHOSTS file but it doesn't change anything. So I then make changes to the hosts file by putting in the ip address and the computer name. Now they are working fine, but that doesn't tell me what caused the problem in the first place, it doesn't tell me why the LMHOSTS file didn't fix it. I'm confused on what would have caused such a change and why everyone wasn't effected. Also I attempted to connect to the exchange server by IP address instead of the name within the outlook settings and it didn't help. Below is the network info.

Windows NT 4.0 SP6a
Outlook 2000 SP1
Windows 98SE
Windows XP Pro SP1

Thanks...

 

[GlenJohnson]

LMHOSTS wouldn't help. This is only used for work on a network with pre w2k machines. If you want to get help with internet access, the hosts file is the one to use. You did right with the hosts file. This doesn't help with the original problem. What changed to make things stop working? Is there anything in your log files?

Glen A. Johnson
"To fear the worst oft cures the worse."
William Shakespeare (1564-1616); English dramatist, poet.

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[mcship]

Glen..I can see looking back now that since the outlook clients were originally setup using the name of the server instead of the IP address that the LMHOSTS file didn't work but almost all of my machines are pre W2K, the majority of the users are Win98SE. On the question about the logs, I didn't even look through them to be honest and I'd image if anything was there it's been overwritten but I'll go back through and check.

 

[FredUG]

Do you use anti-virus software, on the Exchange server that does "real time" scans? Once I disabled real time scans (NAV Corp) on our Exchange2k server the problem that you describe went away.

Good luck,

FredUG

 

[mcship]

Yes I do have Anti Virus on the server and it's scanning incoming and outgoing files. But I don't have the exchange option that checks attachments in emails for virus. Is that what your talking about?

 

[lullysing]

Did you check the affected computer's DNSes and the hosts file? was there anything funky going on in those values?

_____________________________
when someone asks for your username and password, and much *clickely clickely* is happening in the background, know enough that you should be worried.

 

[FredUG]

No, I'm not talking about AV for Exchange that checks in/out mail. I'm talking about AV for NT4 that checks files on your local or network drives. We use NAV Corp, for example, and there's an option for "File System Realtime Scan" that, once disabled, stopped the symptoms you're experiencing.

Hope that helps,

FredUG

 

[mcship]

FredUG...Yes I have AV for the server and yes it's setup to scan incoming and outgoing files for the local and network drives. I can disable that and give it a try. But I don't see that being the problem, maybe if everyone was experiencing the issue then I could see it being a problem with the local server, but it's just about 75% of all users. I'll let you know what happens.

 

[FredUG]

I hope that helps but it may not. We had the same symptoms you described and it turned out that Norton was causing the bottleneck for most but not all users. Our application servers sometimes had a severe slowdown until we disabled the "realtime" scanning too. Maybe it's just a Norton/Symantec thing...

Good luck,

FredUG