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Finally, some field experience with Exchange!
Agent6376
Member Posts: 201
So I get a call today from one of the other Agents in my area. He received a call saying that one of our clients could not send or receive mail using exchange and that he knew nothing about Exchange. He asked if I'd be willing to take the job, and I took it without hesitation. For someone like myself, I love opportunities to work with technology that I haven't dealt with in the past. Although I've done some studying on Exchange and a little labbing, I definitely wouldn't call myself an Exchange admin under any circumstances, rather I'd say a major work in progress.
So here's the scoop on what happened-mind you after looking at this in retrospect that it wasn't all that complicated but regardless, it was a thrill to resolve the issue.
I get to the office (a law firm) and the client gives me some documentation that they received from AT&T basically saying that their NS servers have been changed to AT&T's NS servers as opposed to whatever they were before. After some digging, I found that Bellsouth hosted the client's website, and all other DNS services were hosted on networksolutions.com. Since Bellsouth is no longer going to host websites anymore, they needed to switch the web hosting over to AT&T and in the process they changed the NS servers for the client's domain. After they did this, all MX records were pointing to AT&T's mail servers instead of the client's Exchange server at her office.
I created an A record, mail.%companyname%.com, then set the MX record with a priority of 1 to that new A record, then set another MX record at %companyname%.com, where webmail was enabled. This was so that if the Exchange server goes down for whatever reason, mail would failover into the webmail so massive numbers of NDRs weren't issued to various other clients and the firm could still stay current in communication with others.
After waiting about 15-20 minutes, the DNS records were updated and the client was able to receive and send mail. How exciting!
Again, I know this wasn't exactly rocket science but it was something new to me completely. I can't find a company that will take me in with as little experience I have and every little bit of hands on that I get is such a breath of fresh air. It stinks that I would be considered a paper MCSE, but hey at least I'm trying 
.
Thanks for reading!
So here's the scoop on what happened-mind you after looking at this in retrospect that it wasn't all that complicated but regardless, it was a thrill to resolve the issue.
I get to the office (a law firm) and the client gives me some documentation that they received from AT&T basically saying that their NS servers have been changed to AT&T's NS servers as opposed to whatever they were before. After some digging, I found that Bellsouth hosted the client's website, and all other DNS services were hosted on networksolutions.com. Since Bellsouth is no longer going to host websites anymore, they needed to switch the web hosting over to AT&T and in the process they changed the NS servers for the client's domain. After they did this, all MX records were pointing to AT&T's mail servers instead of the client's Exchange server at her office.
I created an A record, mail.%companyname%.com, then set the MX record with a priority of 1 to that new A record, then set another MX record at %companyname%.com, where webmail was enabled. This was so that if the Exchange server goes down for whatever reason, mail would failover into the webmail so massive numbers of NDRs weren't issued to various other clients and the firm could still stay current in communication with others.
After waiting about 15-20 minutes, the DNS records were updated and the client was able to receive and send mail. How exciting!
Again, I know this wasn't exactly rocket science but it was something new to me completely. I can't find a company that will take me in with as little experience I have and every little bit of hands on that I get is such a breath of fresh air. It stinks that I would be considered a paper MCSE, but hey at least I'm trying .Thanks for reading!