I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours troubleshooting Outlook Web Access at the hospital. For whatever reason it stopped working yesterday morning, and has worked sporadically since. I’ve now moved it off the DMZ and onto the local lan to ensure nothing in the firewall could possibly screw it up. Yet it still refused to run properly.

So next it was re-installing, and wanting everything overwritten. Except that the MS engineers, in their infinite wisdom won’t let you overwrite newer files without answering yes to every single one! You can say “no” to all, but there is no option to say “yes” to all. The re-install partially fixed the problem, but IIS was quirky too, and kept picking up other settings since I’ve removed the information store from the front end. The virtual directories for Exchange would redirect as well if I changed the root directory to a redirect, which resulted in the browser endlessly looping.

The fix was to use a default page that reloaded the correct page. It’s cleaner because it’s outside of the IIS settings, and standard with every other web server.

OWA has been unreliable for us since we first installed v5.5, and I’m sure much of that has to do with the firewall being between OWA and Exchange. Perhaps the new configuration will run longer than a few weeks before mysteriously failing.