Ours was an E2K3 to E2K10 migration. We went live on E2K10 SP1. After moving all the mailboxes and functionality, including OAB generation, to E2K10 and making sure that public folders were set to replicate between my E2K3 and E2K10 servers, and making sure that everything was running okay, I powered down the E2K3 server. My thought was to leave it off for a while to see if anything was broken before uninstalling it. Nope, everything worked just fine and ran that way for a couple of months.
Then I updated E2K10 to SP3, with the E2K3 server still turned off. From that date, people started complaining that updates to the GAL weren't showing up in Outlook 2010 (cached mode), but going to the Outlook "Advanced Search" would show the updates. Okay, that's simple - the GAL is current and accurate, but the OAB isn't. I should make it clear that Outlook was throwing no sync errors related to the OAB and the OAB worked just fine prior to the SP3 update.
Looking at the E2K10 server, I saw the lovely event 9335 referring to /o=EXORG/cn=addrlists/cn=oabs/cn=Default Offline Address List, and event 9331 referring to "\Default Offline Address List". Based on that, it would seem that the OAB was
trying to write SPECIFICALLY to the PF on the old E2K3 server - I do have PF and web distribution turned on, because I have some older Office clients. I powered up the old E2K3 server and let everything sit over the weekend and came in today the OAB
is just fine and up to date.
If that assertion sounds correct, a) why was this not a problem on SP1 but suddenly became one on SP3? b) if the OAB couldn't get regenerated, why wasn't Outlook throwing sync errors? c) is there a way to tell the OAB to write to the E2K10 server PF instead of the E2K3 PF?
Thanks.