Sometimes, a problem can temporarily stump
even experienced Exchange 5.5 administrators. For instance, your
servers all seem to work, your users notice no problems, and yet
adding an owner to a distribution list produces the following
error:
An internal processing error has occurred: Invalid
Attribute Syntax.
Please restart the Administrator program, Microsoft Exchange
Server or both.
Microsoft Directory ID: DS_E_INVALID_ATTRIBUTE_SYNTAX
Stopping and restarting the Administrator
program or the Microsoft Exchange Directory service doesn’t help,
and even a system reboot fails to solve the problem.
The distribution list in question works,
intersite and intrasite replication function normally, and there
aren’t any unusual messages in the Event log. All is well–except
you still can’t add an owner to that distribution list.
The fix is simple. Open the Properties of the
distribution list, and you’ll see that the value in the Expansion
Server field is blank. Select Any Server In Site or choose any
desired server from the drop-down list for the Expansion Server
field. Once you make this selection, you can add an owner to the
distribution list and close the dialog box without encountering an
error.
