Ever since my company upgraded our Exchange 5.5 servers to SP4, we’ve encountered problems with our MTA. It began with a crashing MTA, which would log no errors to the event log – it would simply stop. Now, after MS’s suggested course of action – re-applying the SP and re-running the Optimizer, our problem has mutated. Our event log begins showing some 9318’s and 9316’s, but when we attempt RPings between servers, we get no failed pings. Everything looks like it should be up and screaming like a banshee, but messages pile up – sometimes in the queues, sometimes in the Private Information Store. Regardless, it’s the same net effect for our users – the messages hang in their outbox. Someone from our Exchange team always has to either stop and restart the MTA, or reboot the server. Of lately, our MTA has not always been found in a controllable state, thus necessitating the reboot. Before the reapplication of SP4, it was a simple bandaid fix. While we waited for MS to give us a solution, I scheduled a “net start MSExchangeMTA” batch file to happen every 3 hours, which seemed to catch the problem before we had too many people calling in about it. Now, however, our MTA is never found in a controllable state. Have others noticed these problems, and if so, has anyone been given or found a fix or workaround?
