Weird OWA connection issue.

[kenwalters]

For basically the last week we have had issues connecting to OWA inside our network. We're running Exchange 2003 with a FE server and a three node clustered back-end. Last Thursday we reinstalled the SSL certificate for OWA since the previous one expired and we transferred it to another vendor.Since then we have sporadic issuses with users connecting to webmail inside of our network. It comes up with page not found. The wierd thing is that after awhile, it appears that this issue just goes away and the machines conenct. Then they stop connecting again.
Microsoft updates were applied to the workstations two weeks before this issue started. Same thing with the FE server. The other thing we noticed is when the page not found screen pops up, the workstation shows crypt32 errors in the event log. Thee errors make it look like an update did not complete.
Are there any tools out there to test OWA connectivity from the workstations, or even to see if there are anything in the IIS logs, which I doubt since the workstaitons never appear to get that far.

 

[stusmi]

Hi,
This sounds like a dns issue to me. When you have the problem can you ping the OWA address? Is the FE server listening on more than one IP address?
e.g
Your server has two IP addresses and both will register in DNS
Your OWA website is listening on one address but the clients could receive the other address when doing the dns lookup

Stu

 

[kenwalters]

I checked on that and we were able to ping the server name through DNS.
The server is also only has a single address.
As of right now it appears the issue is going away. We don't know if the issue was a lag with the new certificate or something else.
Thank you for the information.