Constant password issues on LAN

C

Chris Hendricks

Hi there -

I am having a weird password problem - it started about two weeks ago, and I
haven't been able to figure it out.

When I'm on my company's LAN at the office is the only time this really is a
problem. When I work from home on the VPN I don't seem to have this issue.
I'll be working along, and I'll get a dialog box that says...

"Mail could not be received at this time. The server for account "My
Account" returned the error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad
password." Your username/password or security settings may be incorrect.
Would you like to try re-entering your password?"

So I click yes, and re-enter my password (clicking the box that says to save
the password). Most of the time this seems to occur when Entourage says it
is updating Deleted Items or Sent Items. The Inbox will even update once I
do this, but 3 minutes later, it chokes again. As a matter of fact, in the
time it has taken me to type this post, I have seen this request 4 times.
And before you ask, I am typing in my password correctly :)

One work-around I have found is to restart Entourage. So I restart and
Entourage behaves for a while. I haven't changed my Exchange settings, and
they are pretty normal - I did have to set the directory port to point at
the global catalog port (3268) instead of LDAP so I could check names and do
directory lookups, but other than that, it's a normal setup.

Not sure why it would work fine over the VPN and not over the LAN. Any
ideas?

Thanks,
Chris
 
R

rliebsch

I had this before we moved our office to a Gigabit network. We had a bu
configured ethernet running at 10/100. We had about 65 users on Mac. I
would happen in bursts.

I did find coincidents like: if one person or a group was getting
large attachment it would stall that persons session, then the rest o
the organization would be prompted for their passwords, over and ove
agian, the only way to actually get back into mail was to cycl
Entourage
 
C

Chris Hendricks

Unfortunately I'm the only Mac user...IT just looks at me funny when I tell
them about stuff like this. I'm not sending/receiving large attachments
(although I'm sure someone else could be...)
 
N

Nathan Herring [MSFT]

Do you have any firewall and thus any proxy configurations? We had instances
where our proxy server would let you point either outside into the internet
or inside to corporate resources, so you could connect via the proxy to the
internal mail server, but it tended to cause the password problem to happen.

If you aren't using SSL and you sniff the network packets, you will probably
see the server returning HTTP error 440 multiple times in a row. By itself,
it means that your login session has timed out. However, if Entourage passes
your credentials back to the server and it immediately reports that your
login session has timed out, then in that context, Entourage believes your
password is wrong. (The Exchange server definitely returns that error when
you specify an incorrect password.)

-nh
 
C

Chris Hendricks

No. I'm on the same subnet as the server. There aren't any proxies or
firewalls between my Mac and the server. I understand what you are saying
about the 440 error, but what I don't get is why this is complaining when my
password is not incorrect. If I type in the password again, save it, close
Entourage, then restart it again, my mail gets sent/received just fine.
I'll have to get some packet traces.

Thanks
 
F

fellmeister

Chris said:
Hi there -

I am having a weird password problem - it started about two weeks ago, and I
haven't been able to figure it out.

When I'm on my company's LAN at the office is the only time this really is a
problem. When I work from home on the VPN I don't seem to have this issue.
I'll be working along, and I'll get a dialog box that says...

"Mail could not be received at this time. The server for account "My
Account" returned the error "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad
password." Your username/password or security settings may be incorrect.
Would you like to try re-entering your password?"

So I click yes, and re-enter my password (clicking the box that says to save
the password). Most of the time this seems to occur when Entourage says it
is updating Deleted Items or Sent Items. The Inbox will even update once I
do this, but 3 minutes later, it chokes again. As a matter of fact, in the
time it has taken me to type this post, I have seen this request 4 times.
And before you ask, I am typing in my password correctly :)

One work-around I have found is to restart Entourage. So I restart and
Entourage behaves for a while. I haven't changed my Exchange settings, and
they are pretty normal - I did have to set the directory port to point at
the global catalog port (3268) instead of LDAP so I could check names and do
directory lookups, but other than that, it's a normal setup.

Not sure why it would work fine over the VPN and not over the LAN. Any
ideas?

Thanks,
Chris
Click to expand...
 
F

fellmeister

Chris

I have the same problem I often need to enter my user name and password
twice to get logged on to the exchange server. The second time nearly
always does it.

Simon
 
N

Nathan Herring [MSFT]

No. I'm on the same subnet as the server. There aren't any proxies or
firewalls between my Mac and the server. I understand what you are saying
about the 440 error, but what I don't get is why this is complaining when my
password is not incorrect. If I type in the password again, save it, close
Entourage, then restart it again, my mail gets sent/received just fine.
I'll have to get some packet traces.

Thanks
Click to expand...

It (Exchange) should not be doing so, and Entourage is abiding by Exchange's
notification. We have seen this in-house sporadically, though having
customer-provided traces that confirm that it's not merely our own IT setup
that is causing the problem may get some more traction into getting some
investigation (on the Exchange team's end) as to why it's happening and how
to solve it.

-nh
 
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