Exchange 2010 - emails lost/corrupted whilst unable to connect to AD

[Meldrew]

Hiya.

 

Any exchange 2010 experts advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

As a little background, on Friday having been running our server 2008 R2 network on just an additional DC without a FRDC for a while (waiting for our hardware support supplier to see if the FRDC was recoverable), we finally seized roles to the additional DC and promoted it to a FRDC. We then added the fixed, but wiped server back onto the domain as an additional DC (you could say that the roles had been swapped in effect) with a different name. All seemed fine. I also took the opportunity to upgrade our AV on the servers to the latest version (in hindsight a bad idea to make too many changes at the same time).

 

Over the weekend I realise that the exchange server isn't working and upon remote desktop in, it has lost its connection with AD - neither DC is contactable for LDAP traffic. After much fiddling I decide that the AV's firewall might be blocking the traffic and to eliminate it, I uninstalled it on the DCs and exchange. Things seemed okay, but coming into school on the Monday, its not working again.

 

Again, much fiddling later everything is working, Outlook can connect to exchange, emails can come and go just fine, etc, but its come to light that some emails sent externally into school during the weekend have either been corrupted or simply didn't arrive anywhere. Senders it appears didn't receive any notification of problems. To make matters worse, we have a number of vacancies with closing dates this week for which applicants may have applied, but we never received anything.

 

An example of a corrupted email is (I've edited out the actual email addresses):

From:

To:

Subject: Maths Teacher Application

 

 

--86090315-2024142612-1424596625=:80392--

 

And that's it. The line in the body looks like a multipart boundary to me.

 

With the corrupted ones, we can at least email the sender to ask them to resend, but ones that are missing - any idea where I could look for traces? I've checked the receive connector and it wasn't set for diagnostic logging.

 

Many thanks in advance,

 

Meldrew.