Weird OWA Locking Up Problem 4

[BryFerreira]

I have a really bizarre problem concerning logging in to my Exch 5.5 OWA. Hopefully somebody may have had the same issue and may have a fix.

Off of a fresh reboot of my Exchange server, the OWA works like a champ for approx. 16 - 24 hours, it depends sometimes and then all of a sudden, as I or any other user tries to login to the OWA, it will just hang on the main login screen, usually around 4 or 5 bars (on Internet Explorer) into the process. I am using NT authentification so after putting the username and clicking the "click here" link it should take me to the standard NT login menu and from there into the inbox. It never gets to the NT login, just hangs there. Once I close the browser and try to relogin to OWA the main screen won't even come up at that point but I won't get any Page Not Found errors, just a blank screen.

I have tried to restart IIS with no success and there is absolutely nothing that I can find in the Event Logs that explain what is happening. I have browsed through MS Knowledge Base but can't really find anything that fits this problem. After I reboot the server, everything comes back up fine and OWA works again for another 16 hours or so.

Anybody ever ran into this before?? Any help or at least a place to look would be greatly appreciated. One last thing, I have checked the server for viruses and it checks clean as far as I can tell and I don't think this is a Port 80 problem because I can ping the server fine.

Thanks

BJF

 

[BryFerreira]

Concerning the post above... my bad concering the login process. It does allow me to go through the NT security process and then locks up after putting in the username and password. It's almost like it cannot authenticate into the mailbox. I did check to make sure NT security was working which it was and local Outlook clients are totally unaffected by this OWA problem.

BJF

 

[jsadov]

I have been having the same problem for a couple weeks. I have synched I_WAM and I_USR account passwords for the server using cscript.exe and synciwam.vbs and matched them in AD. I have reinstalled OWA and Exch sp4. I have made sure all updates are on this server, which is Win 2K w/ Exch 5.5. It is a single Exchange server that we have, no cluster. I have spent hours in the MS KB and searching on google. No luck. Nothing in Event Log that helps or indicates a problem.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggesions?!

 

[BryFerreira]

I am pretty much running the same setup on my Exch server. It's a Win2K box w/ Exchange 5.5. The server is not a DC but everything seems to match up fine in AD.

My box crapped out again Saturday, around 17 hours or so from last reboot and when I rebooted this morning, whalla... everything was back up and running fine.

This is a very weird problem...

 

[beckas]

By chance is anyone using Outlook 2003 at your company? If you are, check out this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;818709&Product=ech

OWA was freezing several times a day my company and the only thing that I could do to fix it was to reboot the server. It took me quite a while to figure out what was causing the problem, and once I applied the fix listed in the above link, the problem was resolved.

 

[creg]

I am not sure if this will help you. Our company was having problems with OWA freezing up, but was after logon and it varied from user to user. The problem turned out to be the settings in Options for how often OWA checks for new incoming messages. Some people had it set to 1 minute, which was causing OWA to periodically freeze up. Changing the setting to 5 or more minutes solved the freeze up problem.

 

[lapaglcy]

I too am having the same issue. I was rebooting the exchange server which got to be troublesome especially in the middle of the day. I to have researched event logs and ms knowledge base. NOTHING! I did find a work around to rebooting the exchange server. I tried stopping the wwpublishing service but ti would error out.

Now I just go to task mgr find the inetinfo.exe process and end it. Then I go to service and restart

http://www publishing

service.

If anyone has a fix for this besides this one please reply

 

[Mottster1]

Oh yes, the mighty OWA lockup issue. It's an issue that i've been dealing with for the last 6 weeks. Here's what I've done to resolve the issue

(1) Launch the Internet Services manager. Then bring up the properties for the default website. Click on the home directory tab and put a check next to Run in seperate memory space (isolate process)

(2) Make sure that you anti-virus software isn't performing hard drive scans and set to avoid particular folder (i.e. exchsrvr folder).

(Hint If you are not able to login to OWA. Here's how to restart the process without having to reboot.

(1) Launch services manager. Stop the World Web Publishing Service, it will take 1-3 minutes to die. But it won't die properly.

(2) Load up the task manger and find the process inetinfo.exe. Then kill the process.

(3) Restart World Wide Web Publishing service.

(Hint If the process is stopping, setup a monitor in Exchange Server to monitor that process to make sure that it's not stopping.

Sean

 

[spuddym]

Have you added any recent patches or service packs?

Is SP4 for exchange 5.5 installed correctly - try reinstalling it.

 

[manners]

Hello.

We are also having the same problem. We do use Outlook 2003 with Exchange 5.5. We have recently applied the Q818709 fix and this seems to have no affect.

We are getting the same problem as BryFerreira, its bringing up the NT authentication box, refusing the password three times and then going to a blank screen. On assasion it will give an error message of &quot;Cannot connect to server <servername>&quot; or &quot;Failed to get inbox&quot;.

I've made sure all mailboxes have a unique alias.

Its a strange problem as it only happens to some users. The only fix at the moment is to stop and restart IIS on the server. Exchange 5.5 is running SP4.

Anyone got any ideas'?

 

[Jabruzzo]

Beckas's post was right on the money. The day OWA started to hang was the day after some of the staff started to use Outlook 2003. I applied the patch from MS Knowledge Base - 818709 and I have had a problem since.

Thanks Beckas.

 

[bameeri]

here is the fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=818709

 

[manners]

Hello.

We've had that patch on for about 2 weeks now and it has not fixed our problem. Any other ideas?

 

[lapaglcy]

I had the same issues you were having. I finally got sick and tired of getting called in so I took a stand alone 700 mhz pc and installed iss and owa on it. I then stopped the services for iss and wwp on the exchange server and things have been great for two weeks now.

 

[yanks2112]

Hello

I have had this same exact problem on my OWA/Exchange server. My fix was to Kill the Inetinfo process. This got to be a real headache since OWA would die withing 12 hours. I wasn't able to find any fixes (after applying all necessary updates) so what I did was I moved my OWA off of the Exchange server and onto a workstation with 128MB of memory and a 10GB hd, hardly a powerful machine but I have not had any problems and have not rebooted the OWA server in 2 1/2 months. I have no idea what causes this issue and the only advice I can offer is to move OWA off of your Exchange server, I hope thats possible. If not then I would follow the advice of Mottster1, this allows you to restart the process without having to reboot your Exchange server.