All, I posted the below issue to the Macintouch website, where someone recommended I join the Entourage-talk mailing list - which I have just done. I understand this issue may have already been addressed - I've gone back through the last two months of digests and didn't see anything, but apologies nonetheless if I'm covering ground already covered in this mailing list. To confirm one thing about the below - the weird thing for me is that when the problem occurs, neither Entourage nor any Mac-based web browser (I've tried Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera) can access the mail server - all will time out. But, I can run Internet Explorer in VMWare and access email - albeit slowly. I suspect some sort of timing issue. I should clarify as well that no VPN is involved. Anyway - here goes - below is the original problem post:
All, I thought I would send a very, very strange Mac problem to you, see if any of you had any ideas. I'm guessing not, as it is an Exchange issue, which I don't think any of you touch, but you are the smartest Mac people I know! My Mac (a Macbook - Intel) was running 10.4.10, but I hit a problem that seemingly cropped up with no warning whereby my Mac could no longer access our company Exchange server. This happened at a time where my company's Exchange server moved hosting companies, and the server was upgraded to Exchange 2007, and my Mac had just downloaded the 10.4.10 update, and it had just downloaded some MS Entourage update, and I had just gotten it back from a hardware repair - so I could not narrow down what the specific change was that broke everything. Murphy's law. Weirdly, I couldn't access Exchange from Entourage or from any web browser (using Exchange's webmail interface). In both instances I would get a warning (normal - we use a self-certified certificate for Exchange which is apparently normal practice) that the root certificate was incorrect (showing that my Mac was communicating with the server), but after that it would just sit there - forever in Entourage, or until a time-out in various browsers. I've tried Firefox, Camino, Safari and Opera. Interestingly, my wife's nearly identical Macbook could access using webmail - she was on 10.4.7 so I downgraded my Mac to 10.4.7. Since then (and probably even then) I can access company email only very intermittently. Strangely it seems to be location-sensitive - I can occassionally access from home, never from my office, but usually can from a couple of different cafes with open WiFi access. I can also access using Windows running in Bootcamp, or (here's where it gets very weird) Windows running in VMWare fusion, but only if I set the network adaptor setting in Fusion to "Bridged" - not "NAT". This leads me to suspect a low-level driver issue on the Mac - possibly in conjunction with an incompatibility with one or more routers. Or, it could be a network latency/speed issue; I'm in China, the server is in the UK, and network connectivity across the "great firewall of China" is slow at best of times. My home network uses an Airport Extreme (the next-to-most-recent "square" base station) and my office uses a Linksys router. I have no idea what the various cafes that do work use. All are probably on nominal 2MB ADSL connections, although connections outside of China rarely exceed 512KB. Any ideas? I'm at my wit's end on this - and am resorting to using VMware Fusion to access my company email in Internet Explorer - a very painful experience! My network admin (who is in the UK) is not at all helpful as I'm the only person in the company who uses a Mac. -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
