ray

Hi,

We are rolling out a new remote access system and have hit an issue with
Outlook 2002 & Exchange 505 SP4. Outlook always starts in the "select
connect or offline" mode dialog. When the end user selects Connect, it
pauses for about 30 seconds and then they get a message that the Exchange
server is unavailable. If they click Retry again it always works. This is
over a dial-up or a DSL connection.

I am 99% sure I just saw a KB article on this but cannot find it anymore.
Any thoughts or a reference to the article are greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Ray

lanwench [mvp - exchange]

For remote users, I'd suggest having them use offline all the time, with
scheduled syncs. It's a lot more reliable...

However, presuming they've got the connection established manually first,
can they ping the server by name before opening Outlook?

ray

Yes. Name resolution is fine. For future reference, the problem was that we
needed to add a special Check Point firewall rule, which seems to have fixed
it so far. Even though we were accepting "all" services, Outlook is
allegedly flakey because it picks ports randomly. This resolution came from
the Nokia support site. We added a rule to accept these pre-defined specific
services right before the rule that accepts "all" services and it fixed it
immediately. We had set the timeout from 30 to 60 and it still happened.
After adding this rule it only takes five or six seconds on the first try.
Go figure...

M***changeSysAttPriv
M***changeSysAtt
M***changeStoreAdm
M***changeMTA
M***changeIS
M***changeDSXDS
M***changeDSRep
M***changeDSNSPI
M***changeADL
M***changeDirRef
M***changeDirRep
NBT
domain-udp

Ray

"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]"