Re: Entourage via the Internet
- From: "Eriq Neale [SBS-MVP]" <eon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:45:05 GMT
Len Hill wrote:
hi,
please can anyone inform me if there is a way of accessing Exchange mail on an SBS2003 server with Entourage on a Macbook as the e-mail client in a similar way to Outlook 2003 via the Internet on a PC?
It looks straightforward to setup Exchange when the Macbook is connected to the network but I have a client that needs to access his e-mail on Entourage when he is out of the office.
Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks,
Len
You've hit the fun one, Len. Yes, this is doable, but you have to do some work with the internal DNS in the SBS network to get it done.
The problem is this: Entourage can only understand one "address" to use to connect to the server. If you have it set up and working on the internal network, great, but how is it going to locate the internal address when it's outside of the network?
Actually, there are two ways to do this. The first is to set up the MacBook with a VPN connection and have the user make a VPN connection prior to opening Entourage while on the road. If the DNS is configured properly in the VPN session, Entourage will have no problem contacting the internal name of the server and making the connection.
The other method is to use the public DNS name of the server in the Entourage configuration. When you do this, however, by default it will only work from outside the network and not internally. That's because, in most cases, when you look up the external address from the internal network, you're going to get the public IP of the server, not the internal IP of the server, and this is most likely going to cause the connection to fail (guaranteed to fail if ISA is on the SBS box).
The solution to this is to set up a "split DNS" configuration on your SBS box. Assuming that your internal network is named .lan or .local, you'd create a DNS zone for your public DNS name (say domain.com instead of domain.lan) and create A records in DNS for the public name of your server (say, mail.domain.com) to point to the internal IP address of the server. This way, when any machine on the internal network looks up the public DNS record, they get the internal IP address of the server. For Entourage, this allows the software to have one address that will result in contacting different IP addresses depending on whether it's connected to the local network or the external network.
the problem with this solution is that now you have to manage the DNS name space for domain.com on your SBS box for all internal users. If you create the zone for domain.com in your SBS DNS configuration, and don't put all the public records and their public IP addresses in there, DNS lookups for those records will fail. And if you change public IP addresses on a regular basis, this can be quite a bit of overhead work.
I have this configuration set up for 4 different networks, including my own. My PowerBook is configured to connect to the public DNS name of my exchange server, and my internal network has a zone for the public DNS domain with a record for my Exchange server using the internal IP address. This way, I can fire up Entourage from my PowerBook no matter where I am and pull my mail down successfully.
HTH...
-Eriq
--
Eriq Neale - SBS MVP, Small Business Specialist, MCSE, Mac Guy
EON Consulting - www.eonconsulting.net
Author of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Unleashed
Listen to the eOnCall Radio broadcast at AIRTunZ
(www.airtunz.com) or hear past episodes at www.eoncall.com
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- From: Len Hill
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