As most of you know, I haven’t been churning out the articles lately. I am in a little bit of a slump, and decided to do a light article this week to help me get back into the swing of things. I decided that one of the best places to start would be with one of the most frequent problems I see people having with Exchange 2000. The question that I probably see the most relates to setting up Exchange 2000 to access the internet. What I am going to talk about in this article is how to setup DNS to allow your Exchange 2000 server to access the internet, as well as how to use Nslookup to troubleshoot DNS settings. Obviously, I can’t cover all possible configurations, but I am going to try and cover the most basic configuration.
I am going to go with the understanding that most of you already have your Exchange Server installations completed. If not, then this isn’t the article that will cover that. For installing Exchange, take a look at one of my earlier articles. Now once you have Exchange 2000 installed, there isn’t much else you need to do on the Exchange side. Exchange is tightly integrated with Active Directory, but more importantly, it is very tightly integrated with IIS as well. This integration allows Exchange 2000 to connect to the internet without requiring any connectors to be installed or configured. This one is a little different, because previous versions of Exchange required a connector of some type to be configured. For example, Exchange 5.5 required an Internet Mail Service Connector (IMS) in order to access the internet.
Now there are a couple of different ways that we could configure DNS for our Exchange 2000 server. For example, I might be running DSL, with a firewall like Proxy 2.0 or ISA Server in place. This would mean that we would have a public IP on the external network card of the firewall. Now, if we were running our own DNS server, we could simply put the appropriate Host (A) and Mail Exchanger (MX) records into our DNS database. Now, when a client queried our DNS server, the record for our Exchange 2000 server would be returned, and the client would be able to communicate with our server. This is a simple configuration from the standpoint of DNS, although it would require additional work in order to get the Exchange Server communicating from behind the firewall. For additional information on how to configure this, see Q276388 and Q308599.
However, judging from the questions that I am getting, the majority of you aren’t setting up your servers in this type of environment. The majority of the questions that I am seeing are centered around small companies that are running a single Exchange 2000 server, and running their own DNS servers for internal purposes, but using an ISP for external name resolution. Although this situation is a little more complicated than our previous example, it is by no means impossible. Probably the biggest problem facing most people is a lack of understanding on how DNS works. For this, I recommend reading DNS and BIND, by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu. You can find this book just about any place that sells books on technology. Another good resource would be the Windows 2000 help files, as well as the Windows 2000 Resource Kit.
Now lets get back to our problem. We have our Exchange 2000 Server installed, we have our internal DNS working, taking care of Active Directory and all its needs. So how do we configure it to allow our internal clients to be able to send email out to the internet, and also to allow internet users to send email to our internal users?
The first thing that we need to take a look at is how do we get our email out to the internet? In this case, setting up our internal DNS server to forward requests that it can’t handle to our ISP’s DNS server should do the trick. So what I would need to do would be to go into the DNS MMC, right click on the DNS server object, and go to properties, and then select the Forwarders tab. I would type in the address or addresses of my ISP’s DNS server(s), clicking add after each one. Now my DNS server will simply send requests that it can’t resolve out to my ISP’s DNS Server. This will allow my clients to get their email out to the internet, but at this point, I am only halfway done. I still need some way to give users access to my Exchange server. The trick here is that my Exchange server is running on my internal network, probably running on a Private IP address. So let’s take a look at how we can accomplish this task.
As a first step, we have to add the appropriate MX and A records to our ISP’s DNS Server. In this case, the records would point to the public IP for our company, typically the external interface of our firewall. Now, we would need to use something like Network Address Translation (NAT) in order to convert the incoming request and redirect it to our Exchange server. In my earlier example using ISA server, publishing Exchange from behind the ISA server allows you to accomplish this task with a minimal of effort, because ISA will forward the requests for Exchange to the appropriate address, allowing external clients access to our internal Exchange server.
Given that we have configured everything correctly, our internal clients should be capable if sending and receiving both internal and internet email. But how do we know that we setup DNS correctly? Enter Nslookup. Nslookup is a troubleshooting utility that allows us to query a DNS database for the presence of appropriate records, amongst other things. Now, for internal DNS, we can simply open up the DNS MMC console and verify that we have correctly configured the Forward and Reverse Lookup Zones. This is easy enough, because we are in charge of these zones, we manage, create and delete them. But what about our ISP’s DNS database? How do you know that they have correctly configured your A and MX records. The answer would be to do a simple query of their DNS database using Nslookup. From Windows NT 4.0, 2000, and XP, simply drop to a command prompt and type in Nslookup
Once you hit enter, you can now query the DNS database. In my case, I have typed in that I am looking for an MX record. The second option tells the Nslookup utility what domain name I am looking for. In this case, it is my business domain, Bellcs.com. The screen would look like this;
You can also see from looking at the second screen shot that I am querying my ISP’s DNS server, which is 4.2.2.2. However, this ISP isn’t authoritative for this particular domain name, as you can see from the reply that has been returned. It does show that I do have a configured Mail Server, as well as the Name Servers for my domain.
So this is how I can see what is in my ISP’s DNS database, without having access to the physical DNS server. Obviously, there is a lot more to Nslookup than what I have shown here. For more information about this utility, simply type Nslookup and press Enter. Then type help and press Enter. You can also lookup Nslookup in Windows 2000 Help, or online at Technet.
That should just about do it for now. Hopefully this helps to shed some light on configuring your Exchange 2000 servers to access the internet, as well as the DNS settings necessary to make it work. Next week we will get back to our regular series, starting with a new Exchange 2000 article. Until next time, cya!