The Exchange Lotus Notes Connector From Hell
I have implemented several Exchange Lotus Notes Connectors, but never has one caused as much trouble as the one today did! Things started off just fine. The company I am managing this migration for is a small one, and as such don't have a wealth of resources (read: lots of spare hardware). They had two suitable Exchange 2003 servers – one for a front-end server and one for a back-end server. As the Notes connector requires the Lotus Notes client to be installed we decided we didn't want it on the back-end server where the mailboxes are housed. Normally I put the connector on a dedicated Exchange server, but that wasn't a possibility in this instance.
The connector installed without incident, and the directory sync went well. However, the MAPI queue for the connector on the server showed a status of “not available.” The x.400 queue looked normal. After working through many troubleshooting scenarios, I finally found a knowledge base article that pointed out issues running the connector from a front-end server. Apparently, due to a number of disabled services (DSProxy, Free Busy, etc.) present in front-end servers, things don't work right. Having never installed the connector on a front-end server I was unaware of this snafu. You can read the KB article here.
After removing the configuration check box for RPC over HTTP and Front-End Server I rebooted and the queue then began to behave as expected. Hooray! However, now the mail destined for the Notes Connector was just sitting in the queue — going nowhere fast. After checking all the usual suspects (9 times out of 10 it is a name resolution issue) I was thoroughly confused. I decided to build another Exchange server to run the Notes connector on as I didn't trust the state of the former front-end server after all the work done on it.
I brought up the third server, installed the Notes connector and all looked good. Mail was flowing from Notes to Exchange without incident. Again though, when sending mail from Exchange to Notes, the mail would just sit in the queue destined for the Notes Connector server. Again I checked all over name resolution front and back. Ping. NSLookUp. Telnet. And so on. Then, in the last minutes of the work day I found an obscure reference to Symantec Anti Virus on the Exchange server. I had told the client to exclude the databases and queues from the real-time scanner. However, I forgot to check that he disabled the Internet E-mail Auto-Protect. Once I unchecked the box to disable it, like magic all the mail began to flow.
From the Symantec knowledge base: “Additionally, the Symantec Anti-Virus server does not include the Symantec Email Proxy that is part of Internet E-Mail Auto-Protect. The Symantec Email Proxy monitors the standard mail ports by default, and can cause performance degradation or failure if installed on an Exchange server.” Here’s the article.
E-mail goodness once again.