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tecstarit

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Outbound Messages Stuck in Queue on Backend

I have two Exchange 2003 servers, one configured as a frontend and the other as a backend. My goal is to have the outbound mail routing from the backend and then getting sent out of the front end. I configured a SMTP connector named "Internet" with a SMTP address space with an address of * and a cost of 1 that used the frontend as the bridgehead. I have not had a problem with this configuration.  

Early last week, my SAN lost a hard drive where the Exchange store is located. My backend connects to my SAN via iSCSI and when the hard drive went out, all of the volumes became disconnected, thus denying access to the Exchange store from the server. Now, it took a couple hours but the SAN was repaired and the store reenabled itself just fine. Now here is the problem. After everything came back online, all mail that was outbound was stuck in my Internet queue on the backend. It sits in that queue and sends my user delay messages until it finally just fails and ultimately sends a non delivery report back to the sender. I can go back into the connector and change the bridgehead to the backend and mail will send out, but this is not the configuration that I desire. I would prefer that my frontend does all of the sending and receiving work and my backend simply sorts and stores the mail.  Any thoughts as to why my backend is not routing any mail back to the frontend?
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RiaanRoux

Hi tecstarit,

It may be that there is a connectivity problem of some sort (includig DNS) between the two servrs.  Have you tried to do a telnet to port 25 from you Backend server to the Frontend BH?  (Telnet FrontEndBH 25).  If this works then you might be looking at a configuration problem on you SMTP connector.  If this does not work, check connectivity and DNS between the two servers.  Try telnet with the IP address too.

Let us know what you find and we can take it from there.
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Sembee
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In addition to what Sembee said, I would reboot both servers. Having had a simular issue in the past. A reboot (which I suspect caused the routing engine to work its magic) fixed it all. And my current SANS are RAID 5.
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ASKER

Thanks Simon. That fixed it almost immediately. I guess that was something I missed on my initial setup of Exchange.