OWA, Cisco and Exchange.

Mr E

Hi folks,

At the moment, if any of us leave the office on business trips, I have to set up forwarding on exchange to forward copies of emails to hotmail and yahoo addresses - not exactly ideal.

Therefore, I'm trying to set up OWA (Outlook Web Access) to give us direct access to our exchange server from the outside world. I have it working internally, and all seems hunky dory. Now I need to set up outside access.

A sysadmin friend of mine reckons that the first thing I have to do is open port 80 on the firewall (Cisco 1602) and route any traffic from one of our available external IPs to the internal exchange IP (he's not 100% sure, though). Also, neither of us have a clue how to do it.

Before I go googling and tearing my hair out, does anyone know (a) if I'm on the right track, and if so (b) how I go about doing this on the firewall?

Thanks in advance,
Dave.

ando

well first of all I'm guessing its Exchange 2000 on Windows 2000 server?
Your sys admin is correct, OWA does work on port 80, like a webserver so I do see the sence in forwarding http to the exchange server, but I dunno how secure it is.
I've accessed OWA from an external location before by remotely accessing the network via RAS dial up, then once on the WAN, I logged onto the server using my username, and then was then able to access OWA by going into IE and typing http://server_name/exchange. I've never tried opening port 80 on the firewall, but you could try it and see if it works

ando

what kind of router/firewall combo do you have setup?

spongebob

patch the server well b4 u open port 80

M