XCON: Missing X.400 Route in GWART Caused by Mailbox X.400 Address (169672)

SYMPTOMS

The Exchange Server Message Transfer Agent (MTA) may fail to add a route for an X.400 connector to the Gateway Address Routing Table (GWART) when calculating the routing. The X.400 route will fail to appear under Site Addressing, Routing in Exchange Admin. In addition, the X.400 route will not be present in the GWART0.MTA text file.

The X.400 connector object will appear under the appropriate site's list of connectors in admin and any changes to the X.400 connector (e.g. modifying the administrative note on the connector to test replication) will be replicated to the site that is missing the route. Other sites in the organization may or may not be missing the same route.

Any server that is missing the route to this X.400 connector will not be able to send or reply to messages originating from the X.400 connector.

The following example illustrates this configuration problem:

                           X.400 System
                                ^
                                |
                X.400 Connector |
           c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCX400 |
                                |
                                V
   +--------+  Site Connector  +--------+
   | SITE A |<---------------->| SITE B |
   +--------+                  +--------+
   c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCMAIL        c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCMAIL
				

In this example, the route for the X.400 connector would be missing from the list of routes under the Site Addressing object in Site A. The X.400 site addressing for Site A was defined as c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCMAIL. The X.400 site addressing for Site B was also defined as c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCMAIL. The X.400 connector's address space was defined as c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCX400.

Site B's site addressing contains the route for the X.400 connector and messages can be sent successfully over this connector. Site A knows that the connector is defined in Site B but the route for the X.400 connector is not available. Thus, mail cannot be sent to anyone over the X.400 connector from Site A.

This problem is caused when an Exchange mailbox has been defined with an X.400 address that uses the address space of the X.400 connector in the site that is missing the route. In this example, this problem could have been caused if a new mailbox was added to a server in Site A with an X.400 address similar to the following:

   c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCX400;s=Doe;g=John;
				

When this X.400 address was entered for the mailbox, a new entry was added to the list of site proxy address spaces. This information can be seen by performing the following steps:

1. Start the Exchange Server Administrator program in raw mode.
2. Select the Site Addressing object for Site A.
3. View the raw properties by pressing SHIFT+ENTER.
4. Select the Site-Proxy-Space object attribute.

In this example, there would now be two address spaces listed for this attribute:

   c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCMAIL
   c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCX400
				

Only the first address space would have been listed prior to creating the mailbox with the X.400 address of c=US;a=ABC;p=ABCX400;s=Doe;g=John. The missing route is caused by the presence of the second address space that shares the same address space as the X.400 connector.