I have a win 2k3 box running Exchange for our office. For some reason the idiots who set this up did not secure or even firewall the box and it has a public facing interface! Anyways Ive pretty much have this box locked down tight and I thought all was well. Last week I had an employee ask if I could install the Outlook 2003 client instead of using the OWA. When attempting to resolve the server name and user name when setting up Exchange on the client it fails to contact the Exchange server. No one else is having trouble accessing their mail or the server. But any new clients being set up cannot talk to Exchange to verify the mail box etc. All clients can ping and resolve the server name correctly and all mail is working just fine. I realized the problem is the Windows Firewall. I have already specified the dynamic RPC port range to a manageable size and they have been added to the exceptions list. I didnt even realize I had a problem until I had to set up a new client. So it seems to me that during the initial set up of your client, Outlook uses a specific port or a dynamic port range to contact the Exchange server. This seems to be a one time thing. As long as I get the client set up I can turn the firewall back on and there have bee no problems. Does anyone know if there is a specific port used for this connection between client and server? Or is this more of MS BS dynamic port configuration crap? Thanks in advance.
