We have 2 sales reps with Vista laptops. One has Vista Business, the other has Home Premium. The rep with Home Premium has no issues connecting to our pop3 exchange server (Exchange Server 2003, sp2) from either the lan, or their home. The Vista Business (Dell Latitude D830) rep cannot connect to the exchange server in any fashion while on our lan. They cannot ping the server, cannot browse to a remote share, and cannot send mail. I guess I should qualify this…99% of the time pings are “Destination Unreachable” the other 1% is split between successful pings and “General Fault” icmp codes. This laptop was able to connect to and send mail from our server a month ago. And they can connect to OWA and our pop3 server with no trouble from their home. The rep complained that their mail was acting “sporadic”. When they send mail, it will sit in the outgoing box for 15 min to 5 hours, no common delay….
I first thought it was a firewall setting, so I disabled the firewall from the security center control panel, rebooted the machine, and tried pinging and opening outlook. No good. It was interesting to note, that even though the firewall was turned off, it popped up a “blocking Bluetooth connection to Logitech mouse…”
I rebooted the laptop, and logged on as a different domain user, still could not ping or connect. Then I tried a domain administrator, to check if it is permissions based somehow…(a reach of an idea I know), but still could not ping or send e-mail. Note: No e-mail was being received either.
I had them log on to the domain from another computer, no issues, so its not related to their account.
As best as I can tell, something in the core layer of Vista is blocking access to the land ip address of our mail server only, they can access all other functions and shares they have permission to, and as domain admin, I could access several other shares they did not have permission to. It comes down to the Vista laptop is refusing access to the email server. I am at a loss as to how to unblock that single ip in Vista. Its not listed in the firewall settings as blocked.
Any ideas? Am I on the right track? HELP!!!