OWA access

**Blunted One** · May 8th, 2006, 05:33 PM

I am currently working on moving our website to a new hosting and design company and ran into a little problem with our Outlook Web Access.

After I had switch the DNS entries to our new provider I starting getting calls and emails about people not being able to access their OWA. I had to switch the DNS back to the old entries to get this working again and was wondering what steps should I take so that when I make this switch we won't lose OWA again.

I have not been able to figure out the proper way of getting our hosting switched without losing access to OWA. Is there an easy way to get this switch to happen and keep our OWA up? Is this something I need to go to my new website provider about or can I do it from my end without their help?

I was informed by the new website company that they don't support OWA as they run everything on Linux servers and use the Linux webmail. Does this mean I cannot switch to them without scraping OWA and switching to something like their webmail? Thanks in advance for any insight you have into this area.

***thehorse13*** · May 8th, 2006, 05:43 PM

Because you need roughly 24 hours to populate out the DNS record to the TLDs and such, your users are experiencing the outage. This has nothing to do with your mail platform.

Create an MX record that points to your old IP as well as your new one but give the old IP lower priority. Once you let 24 hours pass, have the new ISP modify the MX record and remove the old provider's IP.

Done.

---Th13

**mmelby** · May 8th, 2006, 06:51 PM

thehorse is probably on the right track. But in case he is not... Are you accessing your OWA using a subdomain? Like wmail.company.com. If so then maybe when you changed your DNS records you accidently changed the subdomain (which should remain the same) along with the www record.

m2

**Blunted One** · May 8th, 2006, 07:33 PM

Thanks for the help guys. Here is my new dilema. I am now being instructed that I have to keep our hosting on network solutions and need to point those coming to our website to our new website which is being hosted on another companies server.

The thing is they have a shared IP address for our site and I cannot put in a specific IP address to get people over to it. How can I get the new page to display without switching the DNS? The boss doesn't want me to change the DNS, but does want me to find another way for people to view our new website. Any ideas? Maybe someone has done this type of thing before or worked with network solutions and has an idea of how to route those coming to our site for information to our new site.

OWA works on the current hosting site with network solutions so the boss doesn't want me to change that because of what happened last time. I assure him it won't happen, but I have to listen to him and do what he says. So now I am in a bit of a pickle here.

**mmelby** · May 8th, 2006, 07:45 PM

I think you will need to provide a little more information... your web hosting dns record (www) does not need to have the same IP address as your OWA (wmail (or whatever it is)) dns record. I am assuming you have your OWA server in your DMZ.

So it should not matter who is providing your DNS service or your web hosting as long as the records are pointing to the correct place.

m2

***thehorse13*** · May 8th, 2006, 07:48 PM

Simple web server redirects can be used to solve this "new" issue. See the docs for whatever platform you're running (IIS, Apache, etc.)

**Blunted One** · May 8th, 2006, 07:54 PM

Your right it doesn't need to have the same address, but when I switch the DNS to the new hosting provider it cut off our OWA because they weren't set up to reroute it back to our mail server. Since this happened the first time and caused out webmail to go down the boss doesn't want me switching the DNS again even though I have had them add an mx and host record for the mail server.

The only thing I am trying to do now is to have our current website address display our new site. Without changing the DNS to point to the new server that has our new website on it. If you need any more information just ask and I will try to provide it. Thanks again.

**mmelby** · May 9th, 2006, 06:25 PM

Then you will need to take TH13's advice and do a redirect.

***rcgreen*** · May 9th, 2006, 06:42 PM

Code:

&lt;html&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Meta Redirect Code&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.foobaz.com"&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;

&lt;body&gt;
This page has been moved. the new URL is: &lt;a href="http://www.foobaz.com"&gt;http://www.foobaz.com&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Your browser will be automatically redirected to the new site.

&lt;/body&gt;

I C&Pd this off the net.

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