Entourage / Exchange issue...

P

Peter Hooper

Hi there-

I work for a school district in Southern Arizona. I have three schools.
One school (School A) has static IP Addresses and the other two schools (B &
C) use DHCP. After almost a year of fighting with Entourage, I finally
figured out that the trick to allow Exchange configuration was to go into
network preferences and enter the name of my domain under bypass proxy
settings for these domains and hosts. This seemed to fix the whole issue
that I was having (up until this point, I had to use IMAP to set up email
using Entourage, which prevented me from accessing the GAL and Exchange
features such as calendar, and public folders). Anyhow, I thought that
bypassing the proxy settings was the trick until I found that it didn't work
at School C. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Peter
 
N

Nathan Herring

Well, MacOffice only knows what the user has set into the Network Settings
dialog, so if those are misconfigured, it's just not going to work right, if
at all (and unfortunately, it doesn't always give you a good indication of
what's going on).

When it comes to being able to connect to servers, if you set in any proxy
servers, you must specify proxy exceptions for servers that are required to
be connected to directly. This will all depend on the network topology set
up for each of your schools.

If you manually add your exchange server name and/or IP address in the proxy
exceptions, Entourage will always try to connect to it directly rather than
use an HTTP or HTTPS proxy (if available) for WebDAV or SOCKS (if available)
for LDAP.

Assuming that a direct connection is what you want, by providing that name
as a proxy exception, we're now left with diagnosing the connection. Can you
connect to OWA via a browser (using the same proxy settings) to School C's
Exchange server from the machine having the Entourage problems? If not, it
is unlikely that Entourage will be able to do so either. Does the exchange
machine's name resolve (does pinging it resolve to an address)? Does tcpdump
(or tcpflow, or your local packet capturing program) show any messages
successfully back and forth between the client and server? (See
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/sniff.html for more info on
that.)

-nh
 
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