Just recently, our users in the intranet have been complaining about the behavior of the Microsoft Outlook when, from time to time, it displays “Requesting data from Microsoft Exchange Server”. It will timeout and eventually freeze.
At first, I thought it was purely a DNS issue when several clients cannot resolve the server hostname. That has been fixed already but the problem remains.
I checked out several knowledge bases and came across issues with disabled accounts (that’s been fixed by giving rights to self), black hole router (complaints are coming from within the intranet, same network segment as the exchange server).
Access to OWA at this stage (since nobody can open MS Outlook) is also a failure.
Also at this point Dismounting the private mailbox store (hoping to run isinteg.exe) will stop at 66% and freeze.
When trying to restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, status will remain to “stopping” and will never reach the “stopped” status.
Running the Performance Monitor before the problem yields the following observations (during the time the mail service fails):
Microsoft Exchange RPC request = 2 (across time!)
Microsoft Exchange RPC operations/sec = 0
Network bytes received/sent, %Processor Time, Paging is normal.
Looking at the Event Log, I usually see 7011 events.. DNS and BINLSVC both times out waiting for a transaction response. Netlogon returns a warning: Dynamic registration of DNS records fail because no DNS servers are available.
Running a Netdiag /v /test:dns will yield a PASSED report for the dns server. Further verification at the DNS snap-in will yield an online and active DNS server.
(cont.)