Had a big problem with the Exchange Server. It stopped working and upon rebooting the system the exchange services would not start. The principal service that was stuck was the "Microsoft Exchange System Attendant" and the other services were waiting for it. Result: no company email for two and a half days.
When the service finally gave up trying to start it would give the following error:
The Server is not operational Facility: Win 32 ID no: 8007203a Exchange System Manager
Someone had been altering the configuration of the DNS server over the weekend and had deleted a few zones that did not appear to be used. Looking through the list of computers in the Active Directory on the Domain Server (a different box to the Exchance Server), these all had their URLs specified as being in one of the zones that was deleted. On a hunch I recreated one of the deleted zones with a single host entry for the exchange server and, voila, exchange started and has been fine.
It seems that the basic cause was that Exchange could not get access to the Active Directory on the Domain Server, probably because the Domain Server was doing some kind of validation on the IP address that was failing.
What is weird is that all other Windows computers in the building were in the same deleted zone but everyone was still able to log into the domain server. There may be some extra security in there to get access to Active Directory compared to logging into a domain, who knows.
Peter's Moblog
access to this site have you any ideas about this