cannot resolve exchange over vpn

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Guest

Setup is a W2K server (DC, running DNS and RRAS). A handful of VPN clients
(not all) cannot reach the Exchange server. From these clients, a route
exists in the routing table to the network. Clients can ping any machine by
name on the network, except the Exchange server. When pinging the Exchange
server, the name resolves to the public IP address of the server rather than
the internal address of the server, thus they cannot access the Exchange
through Outlook. I have tried host file entries, flushing the DNS on both
the client and the internal DNS server (which has no entry for the external
address, by the way), and playing around with the DNS suffixes in the VPN
properties, all to no avail. All of the clients have the IP address of the
internal DNS server hard coded into their setup, and in general have no name
resolution problems going into the network except for the Exchange server,
and of course the internal DNS server can resolve the internal address of the
Exchange server. I assume that this is some client specific setup, since the
majority of clients do not experience the problem, but in comparing VPN
properties between one that works and one that doesn't, I see no differences.
To make it worse, clients that are having problems connecting to Exchange can
occasionally successfully resolve the internal address and connect. I've been
scratching my head over this one for several weeks... any suggestions would
be greatly appreciated.
 
We had a similar issue.
Our Domain Registrar is hosting our external DNS.
We did not have an entry for our Exchange server's name, but we did have an entry for *.domainname.com. (their default is a cname to
www)
It is an "anything not defined".domainname.com IP address.

If the client makes any reference to the exchange server before the VPN is connected, it will remember the wrong IP and not look up
the correct address.
You also need the domain name defined in the VPN DNS tab.

What I have not tried yet, is to possibly set my Exchange server's internal IP address in our External DNS, but there are possible
security concerns with that.
 
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