Unable to resolve Exchange server DNS record today

Hello greg_the_geek and welcome,

You must login to the Business Class Portal using the administrator email account, then click Manage Services-Email (or Websites) and click on the View DNS Info link and this will provide you the correct Exchange Server address your email users should be using.

Hope this helps you out.

That doesn't make sense.  Why would it change?  They've been using that same host address for a few weeks now, which I believe I did get from the page you mentioned.  I'll check it again, but if that gets changed periodically, that's a nightmare for support purposes.

Hey greg_the_geek,

I believe you will find that "  CH4MBX01.ch4.comcast.net   " is a very old Exchange Server address. Please be advised over the past 3-6 months, Comcast has updated all its Email Servers in order to handle the latest and greatest Outlook 2007, 2010, etc. versions.

Yeah the DNS settings page shows our server as this: mail.ch4.comcast.net

Which just happens to be the same as our autodiscover dns. Although, that didn't used to be the case, because I think that's where it used to show that old address.  The Exchagne proxy shows this correctly.

When I try and setup a new Outlook/Exchange profile, and provide my Exchange server of: mail.ch4.comcast.net , It fails to connect. It does connect using that old address. Which should I be using:

Autodiscover:  autodiscover-rd.ch4.comcast.net 

or

Exchange Web services/OutlookAnywhere:  mail.ch4.comcast.net 

None of which work while setting up Outlook 2013.  Only the CH4MBX01.ch4.comcast.net works, until today. 🙂

Thanks for any help.

Greg

Please make sure your zone file MX records are also as follows:

mx01.ch4.comcast.net

mq01.ch4.comcast.net

mq02.ch4.comcast.net

Let us know if this works for you.

The zone files are correct and match what you listed.  Although, the problem isn't an MX SMTP problem, we are receiving mail on the Exchange server side.  Its a problem where Outlook 2013 cannot find the Exchange server named CH4MBX01.ch4.comcast.net. In fact, as of now, even Google's DNS servers are not showing results for CH4MBX01.ch4.comcast.net, so DNS caching has trickled down to other servers.  Did comcast remove DNS entries for this server name?

Regardless, I need to know what server names are required for our domain to work with Exchange hosting. None of the DNS settings listed in the administration page for "Configuring your mail server" work.  In addition, The names that are listed are setup under our domain. 

Side note, if I login to OWA, I see under Options, About, Mailbox Server Name : CH4MBX02.ch4.comcast.net

But that server cannot be resolved either. 🙂

FYI, our domain is: svpart.org

Am I missing DNS records?

Thanks again for your help.

You should be using mail.ch4.comcast.net for your Exchange server. I am not aware of any specific Outlook 2013 issues not being able to use the latest Business Class Portal DNS addresses. You might want to contact 18--3913000 and have a technical representative crank up a tier II ticket for this to be diagnosed.  It soulds to me like an aberation to what is suppose to be working.

Ok, I will call.

Just a note, when I add mail.ch4.comcast.net into the Exchange server name field on a new Outlook profile, I get an error that "The name cannot be resolved".  Yet, using nslookup, I can resolve that server name to an IP.  69.252.205.109  and the autodiscover name resolved to a .108 IP.

This us smelling like you need to delete the current Outlook 2013 profile and create a new Outlook 2013 profile from  scratch. It also very peculiar that there is an issue with the 2013 Outlook profile's inability to resolve that mail.ch4.comcast.net , try putting the IP address in if it will let you.  This is an interesting one....... 

Smells like it, I agree, except, this is an issue on all computers on the network.  I thought DNS, but the local DNS server forwards to 75.75.75.75, and others externally, and its not an internal domain (so no local records).  mail.ch4.comcast.net does resolve ok, but it wont find any names when clicking "Check Name".  Its not resolving the older exchange name anymore, though. Also, I tried a new profile from scratch, and I tried putting in the IP directly (both of them) and put in username@svpart.org as the username, it never works. 

I did call the support line, she went through a few of the basics, DNS server settings, etc, but has forwarded me to tier 2 support. Am awaiting their call back now.

Tier 2 should get this squared away for you because they have deeper access int the email servers and national servers groups, too. I would appreciate if you could let us know what the fix was for this because it may be a specific or generic account issue.

Regards.....