My brain hurts. Ed Crowley MCSE+I MVP Tech Consultant Compaq Computer "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Smith, Ronni Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 12:52 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Mysterious outgoing smtp hiatus [long] I've twice now seen a mysterious hiatus in outgoing SMTP mail and I am wondering if anyone has seen it before and especially if anyone knows why it happened/happens and how to make it not happen again. I have re-read the faq and see nothing that addresses this. I have searched technet and the archives to the best of my ability but I can't even figure out if the keywords I am using are the ones that will get the answer. I don't recall reading about anything similar other than the new mail notification thing and this is not that although it might be related. This query is somewhat long since I didn't want to leave out pertinent info and I am not sure what is not pertinent so I'll say sorry for the length ahead of time. We have a single NT4 domain with a single Exchange 5.5 SP4 server and all clients are Outlook 2000 although some are NT4 and some are Win2k. I'll give the problem statement chronologically for want of a better method: We moved our offices to a new (to us) building over the Thanksgiving weekend. We got our T1 switched to the new building on the Wed before Thanksgiving so that night I moved over our BDC and our Exchange server and hooked them up. Mail flowed in (as evidenced by the Trend real time scanner listing messages clearly from this list among others). I was happy. I went home. On the Friday the movers moved over our PDC and all the other servers and desktops and I got the PDC (and some other unrelated servers) up and everything looked fine. Saturday I went to test outgoing mail and noticed it didn't arrive in spite of my giving it plenty of time and trying multiple unrelated offshore (meaning outside like yahoo) addresses. But it wasn't stuck in either the IMC outgoing queues nor the client's outbox (in fact it was in sent items) either. I thought maybe there was an issue because my client (NT4) machine had been up before the PDC so I rebooted my client machine and tried again. No joy. I turned up logging on the Exchange server to the max. I tried again. Same thing. No mail arrived at my offshore accounts and interestingly nothing (nada, zip, etc) in the logs or queue or outbox. I had another person try using their machine (Win2k) thinking perhaps I had a mailbox or client software or profile issue. Nada. I noticed that an NDR that had been in the outgoing queue went out and sure enough in the logs I could see the connection made to the foreign server and the message going out. "Aha", I thought, "Maybe there was some sort of issue with the client not being authenticated" because the Exchange server had been brought up before the PDC and since I had relaying prohibited except for clients that authenticate perhaps that was the issue. I don't know enough about rpc communication and/or the authentication process to figure out which services I might be able to restart to get that going properly again so I rebooted the Exchange server. Poof magically my offshore account had all the test messages in it. "Aren't I a clever monkey" I said and was mostly content (I don't like not knowing what happened but I thought I had a general idea and made a mental note not to separate my Exchange server from its PDC for that long ever again) and didn't worry about it anymore because I had many other issues associated with the move to work out. But then last week it happened again for a hour or so (so much for clever monkeys). But this time it magically got better all by itself! I _hate_ it when that happens. Because things just don't magically happen really. But I am at a loss to figure out why it happened or how to prevent it or even what _it_ really was. If it never happens again I guess I could get away with not caring but since it happened twice I don't have any confidence that it won't someday happen a third time. And I don't want it happening sometime when the mail has to get out with $ at stake or something. I had never seen this before we moved to our new building although I don't believe that is directly pertinent but possibly as a secondary cause or something. Or possibly I just didn't notice it before. All the servers are the same machines as is the router and firewall. We have new wiring and new switches (same manufacturer but 100Mbps vs 10Mbps) and the only thing I can think of is the switches might be doing something and the reboot I did of the Exchange server the first time this happened coincidentally happened at the same time as it would have magically gotten better by itself anyway. But that doesn't make me any more confident. I will look into whether or not the switches might have something to do with it but in the mean time... Any ideas? Or suggestions? Or keywords to search for? Many many thanks for reading this far. All responses gratefully received. Ronni _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
