Exchange 2007 problems

[PLightstar]

Having a problem with our exchange server this morning, can send emails and send/receive internal emails but we cannot receive external emails. Tried disabling the new antivirus to see if that helps but it didn't was wondering if you guys had any ideas?

Thanks in advance

 

[MYstIC G]

I'm not an exchange person Plightstar but you may want to provide a few more details about your setup for the other guys, like what AV you're running, etc.

 

[PLightstar]

I was running Comodo AV on 64bit Windows Server 2008 with latest service packs.

 

[MYstIC G]

Does Comodo still come with a firewall? If it does, in my experience the firewall is a complete bastard and will cock block everything useful.

 

[PLightstar]

I've uninstalled it completely, but to no avail. I hate Exchange i've never understood it fully and it annoys me. Had our ISP look at it from their end, but no come back yet. Think I may have to bite the bullet and get an outside company in.

 

[Insane]

So the following is the case?

Mailbox - Mailbox (internal) OK
Mailbox - External OK
External - Mailbox FAIL
?

Check change control first? or if you dont have that, ask around your Department (if you have one!) to find out in case someone else has made a change to Exchange, or even your external facing firewalls without you being aware about it.

The normal troubleshooting procedure we follow in here (this is on Exchange 2003 mind, so you might need to make some changes)

Internal Machine - Attempt to telnet to port 25 on the exchange server
(should come up 220 [machinename)

External Machine (Laptop + 3g dongle works) - check the MX record for your domain using NSLOOKUP or web-based DNS tools.
If the MX record is correct to your external IP address, attempt to telnet from the external machine to port 25 on your external IP. it should give the same 220 [machinename] message.

If you can't telnet onto the box from externally, it might be a firewall problem or sometimes the SMTP service on the server is set to only allow connections locally (some firewall / mail filtering programs will modify the SMTP service settings for this distinct reason) So it will involve looking at the SMTP service through the "system manager" MMC plugin (or whatever its called in Exc2007)

if you can telnet in externally and you get the 220 message , you might need to do some manual SMTP commands (best guidance I've found is here ) to see if there's an error coming up on the SMTP service itself.

If the SMTP service accepts delivery, then it may be stuck in the SMTP queue either due to an SMTP connector misconfiguration, or because the service itself has "bugged out" and stopped doing stuff right. Sometimes a service restart will rectify this problem out.

I am assuming of course, that you rebooted the server after Comodo AV was removed?

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Sounds like a routing issue, possibly with DNS.

It would be great if you could get one of your external contacts to send one of the NDRs to a hotmail account or something so we could see it. If you can do this, could you post a complete NDR, even if you need to hash out some of the address details

EDIT: Had thought it was also a send issue, removed all the Send-related stuff from this post hehe. Need more coffee

 

[PLightstar]

Finally managed to find the problem, the Drive where the Exchange is kept had less than 4GB left on it so it decided to do nothing with the emails, Moved Exchange mailbox to a bigger HD seems to have cleared up the problem for now.
Thanks for the help, almost screamed when I got to the bottom of it.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Hehe ouch

If space is becoming an issue, worth checking that the logs are being cleaned up. Best not to delete these manually but make sure that Exchange knows its being backed up so that it will remove them itself.

Database Backup and Restore: Exchange 2007 Help

Not saying this is what's happening, just something that I've seen shoot people in the foot when diskspace becomes an issue.