Last week after another round of Microsoft update I rebooted our Microsoft Exchange 2007 server. After the reboot Outlook Web Access was no longer working. I could see in Event Viewer a bunch of errors relating to .Net 1.1 and a few other DLL files relating to authentication.
After a lot of looking around online I figured out a few things.
You cannot install .Net 1.1 on the OWA server. OWA requires IIS to be running in 64-bit mode (x64), while .Net requires 32-bit mode (x86). So I un-installed the .Net framework since I didn't need it any how and rebooted.
Things still where not working, so I tried to delete the Virtual Directory right from the IIS admin screen. That didn't work so I restored the Virtual Directory from a back up I had made right before (Trust me this is always a good idea!).
I also found out that with good examples and the proper references that the new PowerShell interface for Exchange is very powerful. However I am still looking forward to Exchange 2007 SP1 when Microsoft brings some things missing from the GUI back.
Today I found the proper way to recreate the Virtual Directory.
Step one is to view all of the Virtual Directories on the server.
Get-OwaVirtualDirectory will display a list of all the Exchange Virtual Directories on that server. The one you are looking for here is "OWA (Default Web Site)" on a default install.
Step two is to remove the default OWA Virtual Directory with:
Remove-OwaVirtualDirectory -identity "owa (Default Web Site)"
The next step is to recreate the OWA Virtual Directory with:
New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OWAVersion "Exchange2007" -Name "owa (Default Web Site)"
Now go into the Exchange 2007 Management Console and setup the correct internal and external URLs and any other settings you may have changed the first time around. One of the changes I recommend is on the "Authentication" tab the Logon Format for Forms based authentication to "User name only" and then setting the domain. This will make it easier for your users to login by not having to remember the domain or typing domain\username.
8 comments:
Thanks for the post. This fixed my /owa/auth/owaauth.dll error also.
hi, thanks for this! helped me get closer to a solution. would you know why when i have clicked login, i just get a blank screen on "owa/auth/owaauth.dll" ???
You are a legend! Thank you so much, I had tried a few KB articles from Microsoft and no luck but this one fixed it for me.
I agree with anonymous!
Short and Sweet. My OWA was longer working after applying Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2007 SP1. Thanks so much for the article and it fixed the OWA problem by recreating it using 3 shell commands as described in bold. It saved me tons of time!
Very good,
fixed my problem elegantly!
Thanks!
Thanks for your post. But How do I remove the owa vdir if there are two CAS. On each CAS the vdir has got the same name: "owa (Default Web Site)"
Greetings,
Marcus
Thanks for the comment Marcus. I am sorry to say that I no longer work with Exchange 2007, so if anyone else has some insight that would be appreciated.
-Steve
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