HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

[Paul_Daley]

I've recently applied SP1 for Windows 2003 to my EV server (5 SP5) and Exchange (2K3 SP1) backend. Everything seemed fine but I've discovered that when trying to access an archived email in OWA I get:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

I've checked the virtual directory security settings, and entered the correct domain details, but still no joy.


Any ideas?

[Tremaine]

If you check the IIS log what other status code do you get after the 403 (eg 403.1 403.6 etc.) and on what Virtual Directory?

Also you might want to check out:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896861

Cheers

[Paul_Daley]

All I get is the following in the IIS log:

GET /exchange/Paul/test.EML cmd=preview 80 domain\user x.x.x.x Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+SV1;+.NET+CLR+1.0.3705) 403 0 0

[Tremaine]

Might want to see a bit more of your log. Have you enabled SSL on your system at all. I have seen issues on our systems where we get 403 errors because the web request is coming in port 80 instead of 443.

This is specifically the case if the actual virtual directory has SSL enabled and not at the website level. You might also want to have a look around your log and see if you are getting 403 errors on enterprisevaultexchange virtual directory???

To check:
Under the properties of the Virtual Directory go to Directory Security; Secure communications, click Edit. Make sure that Require secure channel (SSL) is not enabled, and then click OK. Especially the enterprisevaultexchange/public VD's.

Cheers

[Paul_Daley]

I've been testing this by connecting to the backend exchange server. On the backend there is no SSL in use, and I get the 403 error.

When I try connecting to the front end, which does use SSL, I get a different error:

HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.

However I'm assuming the problem lies between the backend and the EV server.

[Tremaine]

TBH this is a bit of a bizarre one. Might be worth just going through all your VD's to see if everything has been set correctly on the BE.

I mean the error is appearing on the exchange VD which kind of indicates that it is something more fundamental going on.
Did you get any errors in the BackEnd2003Setup.wsf.log after installing the OWA extensions?

Do you have a server where the OWA scripts do work that you can compare against?

If you type in proxycfg from a command prompt, do you get back the BE ip address and list of servers that were defined in your EVServers.txt file on install?

I assume that the EV Anonymous account was all set up on the EV server and the EVAnon VD created etc. by running the owausr.vbs script on the EV server.

If you still cant see anything from that then I think you will have to log a support call. Send them your IIS logs and BackEnd2003Setup.wsf.log for starters.

Cheers

[Paul_Daley]

Looking in the setup log, I was getting ADO connection errors. So I re-ran using the /dnsdomain flag (thanks to another posting on this forum) and it registered loads of things, and now works!

Why putting SP1 on caused a problem I don't know, or maybe it was because we're running a cluster on the backend and have failed over to do the patching?

Anyway, thanks for your help Ghost!