Right this as had me pulling my hair out for a few weeks now. The network managment team are fobing me off with the following excused. Currupt email in backup so backup was looping and eating all resources. Backup overrun and slowing system down. Transport services needed to be restarted. Electric Rain on the adsl modems causing drop outs. Needed to update firmware. The company. One building in poole with the following offices. Medical Brain Injury Recruitment Headoffice An office in Southampton An office in milbrook An office in chichester an office in Luton. Head office in poole is connected to the ad/mail server with a direct link to the server room. Recruitment and medical/brain in poole use a tunnel over ADSL into the server room (Same building) All other sites use ADSL tunnels to connect to the poole office and be part of the company network. The Issue The companies email system is horrendis! Not a day goes by without myself recieving at least 10 calls from users saying their emails are not working. They all have BB or Smart phones with exhange set up with push mail on them. They recieve the emails on the phones ok. But it can take hrs for them to appear in out look. Some users have not recieved mail at all on their pcs after days. Attachments are a big issue. they are a recruitment agancy and send and recieve cvs and time sheets every day. All that seems to be happening is in out look the "Connecting to Exhcange Server" and "Updating Folders" are constantly in the status bar. If it starts to download a msg it can take ages. today one user had a 4.69mb attachment and outlook said it would take 4hrs to download the file. 95% of the time outlook gives up and stops downloading the emails and either says up to date, or "Connection to exchange as failed" There is no issues with exchanger server acording to the server support team. I have tried. Rebooting server Rebooting Switch Rebooting Routers (All Sites) Restarting Transport streams. Recreating users profile using owa Non of these options are working and we are getting nowhere fast. I have run out of reasons to tell people why its not working. Personally I believe the internet is not upto it, or there is a fault within the network infrustrucre and possible faulty cable somewhere or hardware. This is happening across the company every day without fail. APART FROM BRAIN IN SOUTHAMPTON!! They use a RDC connection to a 2nd server in poole and do all of their work on the remote desktop. They do not have any issues as they are connected to the same switch as the AD/Exchange server. But to do this I nees to rip the entire network apart! any other sugestions?
Do messages appear instanly in OWA? I have also seen this problem when there is something wrong with the offline address book. Pick a victim and set outlook to not download it.
Are the messages viewable in OWA? What version of exchange and outlook are you using? Have you upgraded recently?
What version of Outlook? What version of Exchange (inc rollups)? Current AD level? Is DNS configured correctly (inc. autodiscover records for 2007/2010)? Are AD sites setup correctly? Then non exchange questions Are all the offices on different subnets? Are all the routes etc in place (static or dynamic e.g. RIP, OSPF) Has some muppet plugged a cable back in to a switch or port causing a loop? Is file access slow? It sounds more like a network issue (well routing) to me if email works fine on push & if you're local to the server. If you can get me a join me session in the morning I can take a look for you.
I was going to say routing issue as well, so I will add, is the server of a suitable spec to cope with all the connections? how many users are trying to connect at the same time? how many users are there?
The server are HP PRoliants and have 8-12gb ram and 200364bit and 200864bit. Exchange server 2007 sp2. clients are either WindowsXP/Office03 or windows 7/Office 2010. all on 255.255.255.0 poole rec 10.0.1.x poole ho 10.0.100.x soton a 10.0.4.x soton b 10.0.2.x from what I can remember, AD/Mail server is 10.0.100.10 RDP Server 10.0.100.11 Routers are Dreytek vigor 2860. The same machines are unable to access OWA, either get a blank page or page not found errors. if it dose come up then its takes minutes. DNS has been cleared FLZ are all correct. the tunnels are only 5mb dl and max 800k upload on a bandwith test. isp Eclipse/TalkTalk. It may be related but we are now unable to get onto the RDP server using the internal IP address. it will connect then drop out saying rdp server is unavailable due to one of the following reasons, or it will just constantly drop the connection. The external IP to the server is ok. I am struggling to solve this. I have been with them 6weeks and this is the 1st experience with exchange.
how many users are actually dialling in? have you looked at AD sites and services and forward/backward lookup zones in dns? drayteks - there is a fairly recent new firmware out for most models - i have had this firmware miraculousy cure a few niggles and problems I had on a few networks, so its worth updating this if you can, even if its not connected to this issue.
How many users are we talking about in this company? 12GB RAM on an exchange server will do about 10 users if they're just using Outlook. Add mobiles etc to this & it's nowhere enough. What's the outside DNS address for the mail server (PM if necessary) ? I'm still thinking either routing or a fritzed router but it'll be worth looking at the servers & AD
AD on an Exchange server!!!!!!!! That's a major no-no. You also should really add more RAM as well to avoid throttling policies kicking in. (although that can be sorted after this issue is fixed) Personally (& please don't take this as doubting your abilities or touting for business) I'd say get a consultant/network support company in. It'll cost the company maybe £600-800 a day but that's nothing compared to the cost of the loss of productivity that could happen if this takes too long to resolve. If you want me to dial in & take a look for you I'm available until about 4pm today (for free of course), there are a number of people on this forum who'll vouch for me (& a wall full of Microsoft & Cisco certs on my office wall that also should cover me)
^^ you should take advantage of this offer. Saspro is basically the man. Has sorted/assisted on quite a few problems I've had.
Interesting thread, but I think your requirements for hardware are a little high. Our basic setup here at work ran AD and Exchange on 4GB for 10-12 users (at two sites) without any usability problems. Upgraded to a much meatier system (24GB iirc) and there's no appreciable speed increase for Exchange.
I remember there being an update to Exchange SP2 that broke OWA, and if OWA is not working how is outlook anywhere working for the other sites?
outlook on the other sites doesn't rely on OWA, they dial in to the network and sync with the exchange server. at least that's my understanding of the set up.
Outlook anywhere uses rpc over https to connect to a mail server when it is outside the network. As the machines are (or should be) on a routed network on the same domain they should be connecting using standard rpc not using Outlook anywhere. OWA being broken can effect OAB distribution if it's the whole of IIS that's down but as the mobile devices are working I'd say at least part of IIS is up.
I assumed, I thought that I had read it here in the thread, that users were dialling in with vpn's and the separate sites where also connected through a routed tunnel, which would then be using standard rpc and not rpc over https = outlook anywhere. unless OP is using outlook anywhere, and in that case I take it back EDIT: but just read original post again and it says basically that all users are connected to the main site via adsl tunnels (or on same network), so i think its safe to assume he isnt using outlook anywhere?
