Ran into an issue today where a clients SBS 2008 server stopped servicing requests made to hostname/owa. I am still unsure as to what caused this issue but find a fairly simple way to recreate the OWA virtual directory for IIS. Many admins are familiar with this procedure / howto for Exchange 2003 but are unable to find something similar for Exchange 2007. While the step that I will describe below is not as in depth as the previous link, it did resolve my issue.
If your OWA is giving you the dreaded 404 treatment try this: Open IIS Manager and delete the OWA virtual directory. Next you will need to open the Exchange Management Shell. Enter in the following command and press enter afterwards: New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2007 -Name "OWA" .
That will rebuild / recreate the OWA virtual directory and start accepting client requests immediately. Please note that this recreates the OWA virtual directory under Default Web Site, not under SBS Web Applications like a default SBS / Exchange 2K7 install.
Hopefully, this one liner will save you some trouble.
–Himuraken
This is absolutely awesome! Thank for posting this. We had a hard drive go bad in the RAID5 array and, even though we were able to fail over to the hot spare, the up and down process of figuring out the problem wreaked havoc with WIndows 2008.
This was one of the issues and was the first thing I tried (and the last).
Thanks again — a big help.
Tom
If you want to add the OWA virtual directory to the SBS Web Applications site instaed of the Defaul Web Site, just use the -WebSiteName parameter.
For example,
New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2007 -Name “OWA” -WebSiteName “SBS Web Applications”
Who would have thought such a simple thing could be so hard to find!? Why do MS keep on releasing updates that totally kill SBS? Thank you…
Only issue I have now is that under the “Client Access” settings in the EMC, I now have two items listed on the “Outlook Web Access” tab for OWA:
owa (Default Web Site)
owa (SBS Web Applications)
Looks like the metabase needs to be cleaned up of the old “owa (Default Web Site)”. Any ideas on how I would do this? Thanks again…
found a fix for my problem. There’s a very useful article at microsofttoolbox.com for deleting and recreting the SBS Web Applications virtual directories:
http://microsofttoolbox.com/2009/12/how-to-recreate-exchange-virtual-directories/
I totally agree. Im godding.
– Godding