I have been working through an issue we have at the moment with the Exchange 2007 Offline Address Book (OAB) and it’s generation, replication and distribution. In my Exchange 2007 setup the server that houses the Mailstore Role is the server that generates the OAB and then should replicate to the Server that hosts the Client Access Server Role.

The first issue I was having was that the Generating Server was not generating the OAB correctly. Probably not a good thing if people need to the Global Address List. So I hunted through the Event Viewer and found errors pertaining to the System Attendant “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of the Universal Security Group”. Now what I did here was to RESTART the System Attendant Service and that fixed those errors. From my research I gathered that the System Attendant caches some information regarding Globsal Catalogue Server and other information. We had been moving the FSMO and GC Roles around so that would have been the issue there.

So then I opened up the Exchange Management Console and navigated to Organizational Configuration > Mailbox > Offline Address Book and removed the current OAB and created a new one, then right clicked it and selected UPDATE. I then went back into the Event Viewer and checked for errors and there were none. I wanted to double check that the OAB has been generated correctly so I ran this command from the Exchagne Management Shell.

Get-OfflineAddressBook | fl

Take a look at the output and note the GUID then navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server. You should see a folder in there called ExchangeOAB and it should be shared. Inside that folder there should be another folder with the name of the GUID that you noted down from the above command.

What should happen now is that it should be replicated using The FDS (File Distribution Service) that is located on the CAS Server. This is resbonsible for the replication of the OAB from the Generating Server to the CAS Server, my problem is that it is NOT replicating. The generating server has the files but the CAS Server doesn’t. Therefore my clients get this error when syncronizing.

15:02:18 Microsoft Exchange offline address book
15:02:18 Not downloading Offline address book files. A server (URL) could not be located.
15:02:18 0X8004010F

Now if I check on the CAS Server I get a Successful Event like this.

Log Name: Application
Source: MSExchangeFDS
Date: 9/12/2008 8:22:34 AM
Event ID: 1008
Task Category: FileReplication
Level: Information
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: CAS-SERVER
Description:
Process MSExchangeFDS.exe (PID=2332). Offline Address Book data synchronization task has completed successfully. OAB name: “FHS Offline Address Book”, Guid: 81319159-bded-41dc-916e-41cf99eb59b5

But when I looked on the CAS Server in this location C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Client Access\OAB there is nothing there????? Anyway it was late and I thought I would wait and see if it replicated overnight. I came in the next day and checked and there we have it, the OAB replicated !!! Whoo Hoo.

But

The Clients were still receiving the error above “Not Downloading the Address Book”. I configured the OAB distribution using Web-Based Distribution. Now we are going through an ISA 2006 Proxy Server so I had a look at the Logs on the ISA Server and noticed that when the clients are downloading the address book that it is being rejected at the ISA Server. So to bypass this all you need to do is place the FQDN of the CAS Computer in the Web Proxy Tab of your Internal Network and the clients will then go directly to the CAS Server.

Now there are TON of people getting this these types of errors so I hope this will help a few of you out in troubleshooting this issue.