Exchange OWA through ISA going very strange

[mitchell1981]

Hi All,

 

Having a bizarre problem with OWA at the moment.

 

We have just installed an ISA server and I thought I had managed to successfully connect OWA through it. All was working well until everyone went home.

 

The next day I got reports that everyone who was logging in was getting other users mailboxes up instead of their own! More research showed that they were seeing the mailbox of the previous person to log in. This affect only happened to external users connecting though the ISA server. Users on the LAN were ok.

 

Finally I found that turning off 'HTTP Keep Alives' on the Exchange server solved the problem. However, the performance of OWA with this option off is dreadful and we have been getting a lot of complaints.

 

Does anyone else have OWA running through an ISA server and do you have 'HTTP Keep Alives' turned on?

 

Any thoughts on why I might be getting the initial problem would be appreciated. I can only assume that the Exchange server sees all the requests as coming from the same computer (the ISA server) and therefore serves a cached page instead of a new logon screen. This would be normal behaviour, like when a user closes their browser and quickly reopens it again, there is no need to log back in. However, this obviously should not be the case when using an ISA server!

 

We are using ISA server 2006 and Exchange 2003.

 

The attached screenshot shows what a user gets when they visit the OWA page, before they even attempt to log in. The mailbox on the right is that of the previous user.

 

Thank you for any help you can give me.

 

Tom.

[matt40k]

At a guess...

 

Does the LA reverse proxy to your ISA\OWA server? Or do you have direct internet access?

 

I'm guess it's proxied, because ISA is seeing all the external connections coming from 1 address, the proxy server.

 

Again, total guess.

[mitchell1981]

Thanks for the suggestion. Will check it out with the LA and report back!

 

Tom.

[Fuzzz]

Is in your publishing rule under 'To' 'Requests appear to come from the ISA Server Computer' or 'Requests appear to come from the original client' selected?

 

My guess is the first option, if so, you could try the second option. This is only possible if the default gateway on your Exchange is pointing to the ISA.