Exchange 2003, Cisco Inspect and IIS Terminating unexpectedly
Hi all, Heres the environment where we are experiencing our issue: Exchange 2003 SP2 installed on top of Windows 2003 R2 SP2. Weve had a problem with Message Tracking where if we try and track outbound messages we receive a message: "The object ****************** in the message tracking logs can't be found in the directory. The object may have been deleted. The tracking history may be incorrect." Wed seen plenty of mention about this around the internet blaming a protocol filter on Cisco Firewalls called Fixup or MailGuard or Inspect (a blog post about it can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/pamal/archive/2008/06/23/cisco-fixup-and-smtp.aspx). We do have a Cisco firewall in between our exchange server and the internet. And most of the places where it mentions this feature on Ciscos kit all said to disable it (except Ciscos website). Since our server routes all inbound and outbound messages via a 3rd party for anti-spam and AV we didnt see a problem with disabling it for a while to see what happens. Sure enough, disabling smtp inspect cleared up the message tracking issue. But it brought about a weird side effect that was a whole lot more serious than the message tracking issue. Our IIS services started crashing and restarting continuously. This meant it took the SMTP and the Routing Engine services with it. The following errors were being logged in the System EventLog every time it crashed with nothing much in the application log. Event Source: Service Control Manager Event ID: 7031 Description: The IIS Admin Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 1 milliseconds: Run the configured recovery program. Event Source: Service Control Manager Event ID: 7034 Description: The Microsoft Exchange Routing Engine service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). Event Source: Service Control Manager Event ID: 7034 Description: The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). Re-enabling Inspection on the Cisco device and the problem went away. Seems strange that this would fix it, especially since we have a third party acting as a buffer between us and other mail servers on the internet, and as far as I know we only allow SMTP to and from the 3rd Party through our firewall. Now, we would like to do some more digging to see what could cause such a significant failure and were hoping that someone could offer up some suggestions. Or if youve seen this before, what did you find to be the cause? And a broader question, what are peoples experiences with the Cisco Fixup\MailGuard\Inspect feature? Thanks for any help, Mark.
November 6th, 2008 7:10pm

Hi, Regarding the Cisco issue, there has one statement on Microsoft Support website: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;295725 For the IIS, Routing Engine and SMTP service crashing issue, please install Debug Diagnostics tool to troubleshoot it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919789 Moreover, most of such issue are caused by antivirus software. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;821749 Thanks Allen
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November 10th, 2008 11:22am

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