Thursday 28 February 2013

How to test the Autodiscover._tcp SRV record for Exchange

We needed to test a domain's autodiscover setup that we had them configure since we are not confident in the hoster's abilities anymore.

  1. Open an elevated command prompt.
  2. NSLookup [Enter]
  3. set type=srv [Enter]
  4. _autodiscover._tcp.mpecsinc.ca [Enter]
    • image

And, the test for the hosting provider shows that they did indeed make a mess of it. Back to the drawing board. :(

The How-To for formatting the Autodiscover SRV record is in the TechNet article below. That method works for our own SBS 2011 Standard integrated Exchange and our client's setups as well.

We now use this SRV record for all of our client's Internet DNS setup.

Hat tip: Unify and Conquer: Quick Tip: Testing DNS SRV Records with NSLookup

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

How should it look like?

Anonymous said...

How should it look like?

Compro Computers said...

I assume you are also familiar with this tool ? https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

It should look like the pic in the instruction set.

Yes, but we were looking for an answer from the SOA DNS server specifically.

NSLookup brings us right to the door and we get the answer we require up front.

In this case the host had munged things with:

mail.domain.com.domain.com

I tested our own domain and it works but is a bit more verbose than needed. It does show the different methods that the client will use to find the server though.

Thanks,

Philip

nathan said...

Thask for clarifying that. The way it's written the article makes it sound like what is in the picture is incorrect, which has been throwing me as I stare at it trying to find the error and compare it to the record my own host has created :)