getting message about exchange trying to retrieve information from a DC. Sound familiar, maybe Global Catalog issue?

Brian, please post more detail about this problem. Event log information? Troubleshooting carried out so far?

Hi Tony, I am one of Brian's co-workers. The issue we seem to have is that Outlook pops up a message that states Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server Corp-DC.ad.hollandgroup.biz". Corp-DC is one our Global Catalog servers. We also have a GC called Corp-OM and Outlook sometimes pops up a message saying that Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server Corp-OM.ad.hollandgroup.biz. The interesting thing is that we only have this problem at our VPN sites (those using VPN tunnels to get back to the Exchange servers to get their email). The Exchange servers are centrally located here and all of our remote sites attach to it. Each remote site has a DC which also functions as a GC. The Exchange servers are Enterprise versions running on Server 2003 Enterprise in an Active, Active, Passive cluster configuration. We believe this issue to be Global Catalog related. We didnt have this problem prior to the Labor Day weekend. Over that weekend we performed the following changes on our network: 1. We virtualized Corp-DC (demoted the physical server, waited for the domain to sync, renamed the old server, and then promoted a new virtual server named Corp-DC to be a DC). 2. We applied several Windows updates (including SP2 for Server 2003) to all of the DCs on our network and reboot them (includes the DCs at each remote site). We did not perform any updates on the Exchange servers (they are still running Server 2003 SP1) 3. We update the firmware on all of our routers. Thanks for any help you can provide us. Jim

How to configure Outlook to a specific global catalog server or to the closest global catalog server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319206