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Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable - 4.Aug.2005 8:40:00 PM

ginsuedog

Posts: 3
Joined: 4.Aug.2005
From: Long Beach
Status: offline

Hello,

My company recently began moving from an NT4.0 environment to a AD environment. We setup a week ago a new Exchange 2003 server and have been moving mailboxes from the Exchange 5.5 server to the new server. We noticed a few days ago that some of the older win98 mailboxes are getting "Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable" errors. If the user hits retry a few times they are able to connect and use Outlook all day without an issue unless they log out again. The type of Outlook client doesn't seem to matter as this has happened on Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000.

The PCs in question are all Windows 98se and none of the user accounts or PCs have yet been moved to the new domain, all the problem PCs have had there mailboxes moved over from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. None of the win98 clients still using exchange 5.5 are having this problem. All the XP and W2K PCs on the new exchange 2003 server are also working fine. We thought this may have been a WINS issue originally but I have tried adding the new exchange 2003 server's ip to the lmhost file on some of the win 98 PCs without it making any difference. I am also able to resolve by name the new exchange server on the win98 PCs having this problem. Ping also works fine as well.

Any help or suggestions would be great.

[ August 04, 2005, 08:47 PM: Message edited by: gsd ]

Post #: 1

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RE: Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable - 7.Aug.2005 8:40:00 PM

profjimbo

Posts: 20
Joined: 5.Aug.2005
From: Lakeland, Florida
Status: offline

I would get your Win98 users IDs migrated to Active Directory. Your problems should go away.

Exchange 2003 is highly reliant on Active Directory.

(in reply to ginsuedog)

Post #: 2

RE: Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable - 8.Aug.2005 1:07:00 PM

ginsuedog

Posts: 3
Joined: 4.Aug.2005
From: Long Beach
Status: offline

Professor Jimbo,

Well I tried setting myself up on a Windows 98 PC. My user account is on the new domain controller as well as my email on the new exchange 2003 server. I get the same problem. What is weird is that if I put a static IP, and DNS everything works. It doesn't matter if the DNS I put in is our ISPs or the local DNS server.

Should I consider setting up our DNS servers to point to our legacy WINS server? Will this help resolve our problem with windows 98?

Thanks for your help.

Edit:
Well it looks like Jimbo was right. The reason it didn't work for my user account was that our dhcp server still adds the dns address to our ISP instead of the new dns servers. We are going to try a different approach though and add the WINS server to the DNS forward and Reverse lookup zones.

[ August 08, 2005, 03:43 PM: Message edited by: gsd ]

(in reply to ginsuedog)

Post #: 3

RE: Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable - 8.Aug.2005 2:18:00 PM

mark@mvps.org

Posts: 6811
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
Status: offline

Your W98 clients must point to WINS to get access to Exchange server. You need to point your Exchange server at the WINS and your clients at the WINS.
And follow Jimbo's guidance

(in reply to ginsuedog)

Post #: 4

RE: Your Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable - 8.Aug.2005 4:55:00 PM

ginsuedog

Posts: 3
Joined: 4.Aug.2005
From: Long Beach
Status: offline

Mark,
So should I add WINS IP to the forward and reverse lookup zones on the new DNS or should I simply add the WINS IP Address on the new Exchange server? All of our clients on the old domain still use WINS.

Thanks for your help.

(in reply to ginsuedog)

Post #: 5