Exchange Sync Issue and Logging

[lardo5150]

I am one of our Exchange admins here at that company.
One thing we are seeing a growing number of are Android devices throwing an error every so often when a user is syncing mail with their mailbox on our Exchange 2010 servers.

Users are able to setup the account without issues. It seems when they are connected to wifi, they will get the "can't connect to server".
Sometimes it keeps doing this, other times it syncs fine.

One of my network guys will be helping me tomorrow, but in the meantime I wanted to see if anyone else has seen this. I googled and it seems to be a common problem with no answer.

Another thing is, is it possible to turn on some type of logging for the email app? I would like to see if it throws an error in the log.
Would this be the debug logging? Sorry, I have never gatehered logs before on an android device.

I will say I saw this when i was syncing my S3 (I just stopped syncing it so I can 'unplug' when leaving work )

 

[BarryH_GEG]

I'm on Exchange 2010 and don't have any issues with my Note II or 10.1. When I was on ICS a phantom "cannot connect” message would randomly pop-up but everything still worked the way it was supposed to. It went away when I updated to JB. Some folks got rid of it by clearing cache and data in the e-mail app and re-inputting their settings from scratch. I'm guessing it's a server-side security policy issue that's preventing the device from authenticating if there's no connectivity at all.

I assume you've already run this...

https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

 

[MrCeddy]

It seems when they are connected to wifi, they will get the "can't connect to server".
Sometimes it keeps doing this, other times it syncs fine.

This can be caused by lack of a FQDN A record in the DNS server, resulting in the handhelds inability resolving the internal exchange server by using the external address.

Example;
Exchange server is called EXCH01 (192.168.1.10)
external webmail address is owa.somecompany.com (200.200.200.200)
Activesync on phone is configured with external webmail address.

While the phone is on the internal wifi it requests owa.somecompany.com and resolves 200.200.200.200, however most SMB/Enterprise firewalls will not easily NAT into itself.

In a proper configuration the dns server for 192.168.1.X wireless should have a A record pointing owa.somecompany.com to 192.168.1.10.
This will also address outlook anywhere issues.