James E. O'Brien

Here’s an interesting issue I dealt with last week. The company I work for has a lot of employees that frequently work through vpn connections, through which they have access to network resources and the Exchange server. Last week, we started getting complaints that people were not able to send or receive e-mail when they were logged into their vpn’s.

We checked the typical settings, the exchange proxy, network settings, so forth. Nothing worked to resolve the issue. That is, until when we figured out that if we moved the vpn connection to the top of the stack in the network bindings, any network requests would go through the internal network first, thus finding the Exchange server.

Suddenly, our employees are getting their e-mail!

How to:

In Windows XP, open the Control Panel, and open Network Connections. In the Network Connections windows, click on the Advanced tab, and select Advanced Settings. Find your VPN connectiod in the Connections pane, and move it to the top of the list.