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WAN Network Neighborhood & Email Issues

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by elijah-s 1 view

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WAN Network Neigborhood & Email problems
I have a remote office connected via T1 frame-relay that provides for both data and voice between the remote office and headquarters. There are configured as two different domains, headquarters.mycompany.com and brachoffice.mycompany.com on two different private ip subnets. 172.16.1.0 255.255.255.0 and 172.16.2.0 255.255.255.0 Headquarters is running w2k advanced server and the remote office is running just 2000 server. The branch office network neighborhood browser cannot see any other domains besides itself. The headquarters domain can see the branch office through network neighborhood though. The remote office can see machines by UNC names, so it's not a huge problem. But their email via outlook cannot see the Exchange server hosted at headquarters. We have had to write a batch file that the users click on which pings the exchange server. They have to use this batch file repeatedly or they receive the error that the email server cannot be located. The time frame seems to be less than 5 minutes before they have to ping the exchange server again to reestablish communication. Makes me think it might be a router broadcast issue? Adtran 550's. Here are the steps I have taken to eliminateboth the email and network neighborhood issues. Install Wins on both PDC's to replicate with each other (Seems to work fine when finding machines through the WINS manager) Place lmhosts files pointing to the PDC's on both PDC's. Verified the domain were present in the NETBIOS cache.

Enter the IP address instead of DNS name of the exchange server for the outlook clients at the remote office.

Anybody have any ideas or suggestions??

2 replies

by greybeard770

When you say PDC, do you mean Active Directory domain controller? You didn't mention DNS setup. It would be best to have a DNS server in each site, even if you set up each domain with a secondary DNS server for the other end. Both locations should be configured in Active Directory as individual sites.
The search order of name resolution can allow the application to time out before it gets to WINS. Another issue with needing to PING regularly may indicate a problem with arp caches flushing too quickly. Putting an entry for the Exchange server in everybody's local hosts file could help, but that is not the best solution.

by elijah-s

Yes two AD Domain Controllers with DNS authoratative for each zone brachoffice and headquarters. Configured in the sites and services of AD. Lmhosts files placed on both DC's and it shows up in the netbios cache nbtstat -c. Do you know how to add anemail host to a lmhosts file? This problem wouldn't be because I have the subnets set up as class c when they are on a 172. private network, could it? I remeber having to change my subnet mask to class be in order for my default gateway to accept traffic from the branch office.

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