Skip to main content

Clients cannot connect to Exchange

I ran into a problem this week that caused a lot of headaches. In an existing Exchange environment everything seems to be working just fine for existing users. The problems occur when you try to configure an account on a new client. This scenario did not apply to all the mailboxes in the organization.

These are some of the messages that were presented during different stages in the configuration:
Outlook cannot log on. Verify you are connected to the network and are using the proper server and mailbox name. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.
The name cannot be resolved. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.
The action cannot be completed. The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action.
Your server or mailbox names cannot be resolved.
The environment is a pure Exchange 2007 and we removed the last traces of the earlier Exchange 2003 just a couple of months ago. The first theory was that this had something to do with the problems, but it seems like it did not. There has also been a lot of things happening in the Active Directory environment because we are preparing for a 2008 R2 upgrade.

Finally we to found that similar problems might occur if there are any issues with the System Attendant service. The Microsoft Exchange System Attendant is a service that runs on the Exchange server and works like a proxy to the Active Directory for some functions in Exchange.

The service seemed to be working as it should, but after I restarted it everything began to work. I still have not found any logs to identify the cause of the problems, but at least we got everything working.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Binding Enum with DescriptionAttribute in WPF

Binding an enumeration to a ComboBox can be done in several ways. In most cases you don't want to display the value itself, but a more user friendly description. One common approach is to use the DescriptionAttribute on the Enum values to supply a description for each value.  This is all possible in a very MVVM friendly way. First step is to add the  DescriptionAttribute  to the values of the enumeration. public enum MyValues { [Description("First value")] First, [Description("Second value")] Second } To retrieve the description from the enum we use a simple extension method. This method returns the value of the DescriptionAttribute if it exists, otherwise the string representation of the enum value is returned. public static string GetDescription(this Enum value) { var fieldInfo = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString()); var attribute = fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as ...

Binding a HTML-formatted string to a WPF WebBrowser control

Sometimes there is a need to display a HTML formatted string in a WPF application. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most stright forward is to use a WebBrowser control and the NavigateToString method. This approach has one big flaw, you cannot use binding to a string out of the box, but I found a great solution through Stack Overflow which adds a bindable property to the  WebBrowser  control using  NavigateToString . The following class is all that is needed to add that behavior. A new depencency property named Html is introduced to the  WebBrowser  and the proper change action is performed in the OnHtmlChanged method. public class BrowserBehavior { public static readonly DependencyProperty HtmlProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached( "Html", typeof(string), typeof(BrowserBehavior), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnHtmlChanged)); [AttachedPropertyBrowsableForType(typeof(WebBrowser))] public static string GetHtml(...

The Cornball goes to Brunch with Chaplin

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...