I have Exchange mail working on my ipads externally and cellular. When employees hop on to my Wi-Fi access point on our company network, the external mail server no longer works. "mail.company.com". I can change the mail server on the exchange account on the ipad to the internal IP address of our mail server, and it works fine.
Does anyone know how to get the "mail.company.com" to work both internally and externally? Ive tried DNS settings....HELP!
you will probaby have to tell us a little more about your setup, before we can answer your question. For the time being I assume the following:
If this scenario correct then a iPad on your company's WLAN will resolve the mail server's name to its external ip address, meaning it will reach out to the internet through your company's firewall. Since this external ip does indeed point to your own firewall, the connection, which just went to the outside through your firewall has to come back in right away through your firewall again. Most firewalls don't like such "inside->outside->inside" connections. The solution therefore is to set up DNS so that for someone on your internal WLAN mail.yourcompany.com will resolve to the internal ip address and for someone from the outside the name will resolve to the external ip address.
Hope that helps ...
Thank you for the help. First of all I am an iPad novice....8( This is also the first Wireless access point that I've put on my network since installing a new domain controller SBS2011.
Now my DNS is resolving this, I can ping "mail.company.com" and the exchange server IP address is returned correctly internal and also correct external with my physical firewall IP, NATing to my exchange server. (all this done from a PC). I think I have the right ports open, becuase if I put the exchange server's internal IP address in the exchange email account on the iPad, it works like a champ. Im just missing something in the cinfiguration or perhaps my DNS is not 100% correct internally. Do I need something special because its a WLAN?
I assume that the PC you tested this with successfully is on ethernet (cable) not on wireless, so it seems that your wireless clients "somehow" get different TCP/IP settings than the PC on ethernet.
Since I do not much about your set up, I have to guess a bit again; correct me pls if my assumptions aee wrong:
- you have your internal LAN on a private ip subnet like 10.1.0.0 or something; both your DNS server and your Exchange server have an ip address in that private subenet.
- the PC you used for the successful test also has an ip address in that subnet (either as a fixed ip or as a dynamic ip assigned by a DHCP server). The PC uses your internal DNS server to resolve names and correctly resolves the name of your Exchange server to the internal ip
- your WLAN access point acts as many more things than just access point: for the wireless side it likely uses another private ip subnet, probably in the 192.168 range. For clients in this subnet it acts as DHCP server, DNS server and default gateway. Finally the access point routes between your 10.whatever LAN and your 192.168.whatever WLAN.
This means that wireless clients like your iPad will have different TCP/IP settings than your PC, most importantly they will have a different DNS server, namely the access point. So you have to make sure that your access point can correctly resolve the name of your Exchange server to the internal ip address. You should be able to accomplish this by configuring your internal DNS server as the access point's DNS server in the access point's TCP/IP settings.
Again, I do a lot of guess work here, since I hardly know anything about your setup. I still hope that I could help; if not, it would be very helpful to know more about your scenario.
Internal/External Exchange Mail
