My school's exchange server is down.... or is it?

I went to check my email earlier today, and discovered that Outlook would never connect to my school's exchange server. If I clicked "Send/Receive", I get an error stating that the server was unavailable. Thinking it was Outlook, I tried to connect through my school's Webmail portal. It too was down (The connection would time out in Firefox). "Great, the email servers are down" I thought.

Later on, I rebooted into my Linux partition, and I was able to access my email again via IMAP and Webmail. "All right! The email servers are back up!", I thought.

Later still, I rebooted back into windows, and noticed that the servers were down again. This was when I became suspicious. On a hunch, I immediately rebooted into Linux. Email started working fine again! I could access Webmail just fine. Going back into windows, Email stopped working! I can't access Webmail.

So basically, the problem is this: I cannot access my school's exchange server at all in Windows, but I can access it just fine in Linux. WTH??

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Try ipconfig/flushdn ?

At least I had a recent issue accessing my homesever... -> reason: bad DNS entry on my laptop.
Now I'm not sure if that can apply to your school as I'd assume they'd have a static IP address rather than a dynamic one, but it might be worth a try.

 

You mean ipconfig /flushdns? I tried that twice, and it still doesn't work....

 

I guess you tried rebooting...

Hmm...

Clear the cache in case something is corrupted?

 

I finally went down to mu school's help desk, and they got it working again. Apparently, they had changed some settings on their end, which caused about 20-30 students (including myself) to lose access to their email. They had to change a few settings on my machine to get it working again.

They "configured outlook anywhere profile" and "removed exchange record file from local hosts file".

Problem solved!