Strange behaviour of BCM and DNS setup

[AuditMaster]

Hello all,

I had successfully setup BCM 2003 on our Exchange 2003 server and
could access it via a number of SBS clients also running Outlook 20003
against the the SBS 2003 server. The SBS server and exchange server
are the same machine. All was well until one or two users reported
intermittent faults, the classic SPS context error. Anyway, after a
bit of fiddling I found the solution, but I would appreciate any
comments you may have.

For various reasons I use my router (A Draytek vigor) to provide the
DHCP and DNS services NOT the SBS server. The network cards in client
machines were all set to "Obtain ip address etc" automatically. I had
set a hosts file on each machine which gave the specific address of
the server and "companyweb" and all this worked just fine until BCM
came along.

To solve the context problem with BCM, I had to set the "Obtain DNS
server address" specifically to my router AND the server. As soon as I
did this for all the XP machines everything was just fine. I have a
couple of W2K clients that do NOT need this "Fix" and have not
demonstrated the problem. I had tested (using ping) reverse lookup as
well as forward lookup and that looked fine.

Any thoughts as to what's going on and why the hosts file was not
sufficient to convince the BCM clients of the servers IP address.

Thanks

Stuart

 

[Luther]

Hello all,

I had successfully setup BCM 2003 on our Exchange 2003 server and
could access it via a number of SBS clients also running Outlook 20003
against the the SBS 2003 server. The SBS server and exchange server
are the same machine. All was well until one or two users reported
intermittent faults, the classic SPS context error. Anyway, after a
bit of fiddling I found the solution, but I would appreciate any
comments you may have.

For various reasons I use my router (A Draytek vigor) to provide the
DHCP and DNS services NOT the SBS server. The network cards in client
machines were all set to "Obtain ip address etc" automatically. I had
set a hosts file on each machine which gave the specific address of
the server and "companyweb" and all this worked just fine until BCM
came along.

To solve the context problem with BCM, I had to set the "Obtain DNS
server address" specifically to my router AND the server. As soon as I
did this for all the XP machines everything was just fine. I have a
couple of W2K clients that do NOT need this "Fix" and have not
demonstrated the problem. I had tested (using ping) reverse lookup as
well as forward lookup and that looked fine.

Any thoughts as to what's going on and why the hosts file was not
sufficient to convince the BCM clients of the servers IP address.

Thanks

Stuart

I doubt there is anything in BCM itself that would affect the network
configuration at this level. I the issue is probably in sql server
connectivity. Do you run any other sql server apps on your network
that behave differently from BCM?

You may have better luck with your query on a sql networking newsgroup.