Problems connecting to Exchange Server

[David Blaymires]

I've come across a weird problem when trying to get the new Entourage
connecting to our Exchange Server 2000 SP3. My account login in the Active
Directory is "david blaymires". When I try to log in to the server with the
new IMAP account, it fails every time saying there is a problem with the
user name or password.

We then set up a new account called "peter" - nothing else, and that
connected immediately, no problems. We then changed my account name to
"dib" and it connected straight away.

The only thing that we can see that is potentially a problem, is that we
have another person whose name is also David, but his account name is "david
price". Our network consultant was the one who suggested the changing my
account name, based on some experience he had elsewhere when they found
similar problems, and it seemed that Exchange was only looking at the first
5 letters of the account name. He freely admits this may not be what has
occurred, but we can see no other reason to explain why I could not connect
when the account name was "david blaymires". We even tried changing my
account name to "david.blaymires" and "davidblaymires" but still could not
connect to the server.

Can anyone help?

 

[Jeff Koviack]

David,

Active Directory has a few things that trip MAC users up. Active Directory
is based on LDAP naming conventions:

samaccountname : userprincipalname : displayname : sn : givenname

Microsoft has for a long time used a SAM database to store "usernames".
Active Directory now stores the "usernames".

Here is an example of SOME ldap names and example of each name:

samaccountname: jkoviack
userprincipalname: [email protected]
display name: Jeff Koviack
sn: Jeff
givenname: Koviack

both the sam/upn names are security based where displayname is not.

Typicically in an exchange environment a person's login and email address
are one and the same (this makes it easy for users to remember their login
name, but is also a security concern, but that's a discussion for another
thread). In your case I see your name is David Blaymires, but your email
address actually has an underscore "_". I'll bet you're log in name is
actually david_blaymires

Typically, SAM/UPNs are cretated like these:

dblaymires
davidb
david.blaymires
blaymiresd
blaymiresdavid

/Jeff

 

[David Blaymires]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the excellent and informative reply. FYI, I don't post to
newsgroups from my work account, so my account and user name at work are
different to the .mac address (which is deliberately obscured in my email by
the extra x and z characters in an attempt to have the robots miss it. That
may be in vain...) So the _ in this email address is not the one used at
work.

Anyway, I checked my account in the Active Directory. It was definitely
david blaymires. However, we tried changing it to david.blaymires to match
the email address and it still would not connect to the Exchange Server.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, I've finally discovered that what it is
requiring is the Alias, account and user name to all be the same. The Alias
is under the Exchange General tab when you get Properties on the user in
Active Directory. My alias is dib, and it was only when I had all three
items (Alias, account and user name) as dib that I could connect. When I
changed the user name and the account to dblaymires, but left the alias as
dib, I could not connect. As soon as I change the alias to dblaymires, so
it is the same as the account and user name, I can connect.

Which seems kind of weird as I thought the idea of an alias was a bit like a
nick-name... Anyway, it all works now that I have everything the same.

There's a bit of a learning curve with this new beast but I love using it!

--
Regards
David Blaymires

Mailto:[email protected]