02 July 2008

"Outlook Anywhere" and problems with IPv6 in Windows Server 2008

It's not a secret, that IPv6 has some "issues". When I've been in Seattle, at last MVP summit, a lot of IT professionals said that, and all of them recommended to disable IPv6 on Windows 2008 or / and Vista machines. Kevin Reeuwijk from "Innovative Technology Weblog" posted a very good article; Outlook Anywhere is ‘broken’ on IPv6 in Windows Server 2008.
So, if you run Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and want to use Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP) you probably get a problem. It would not work if the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy and the Exchange Mailbox installed on the same Windows 2008 Server.
To make the long story short, simply unselect IPv6 from the properties of your NIC AND (it's very important) make a changes to the HOSTS file. Simply open up your hosts file and make the following changes:
  • Comment out the line “:::1 localhost”
  • Add the following two lines:
This will resolve all queries for your computer’s name to its IPv4 address, effectively disabling the use of IPv6 for self-communication. You can confirm that this works by doing a “telnet localhost 6004″.

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