Recipe7.11.Examining Your Routing Structure

Recipe 7.11. Examining Your Routing Structure

Problem

You wish to examine your Exchange organization's routing structure: routing groups, connectors, addresses spaces, and limitations.

Solution

Download the WinRoute tool from the Microsoft Download Center:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c5a8afbf-a4da-45e0-adea-6d44eb6c257b&displaylang=en
Extract the WinRoute binary and documentation and install them on your management station.
As a user in the Domain Users group, open the winroute.exe binary from the location in step 2.
Click File New Server Query. Fill in the name of the Exchange server from which you wish to pull routing information.
If you need to use alternate credentials, click Override Credentials and fill in the appropriate credentials. Click OK.
Click OK to connect to the Exchange server and Active Directory. Click Actions Refresh Now to update the displayed information.

Discussion

WinRoute is a freely downloadable Exchange tool that is designed to retrieve and display all information that pertains to message routing. This allows you to troubleshoot message routing issues more easily in organizations with complicated routing topologies. It displays the relevant information on your organization, routing groups, servers, and connectors in a tree view. The included documentation is brief, but covers what you will see in the display and how to use the minimal features of the program.

WinRoute does not have, nor does it need, a lot of functionality or automation. By its very nature, troubleshooting is not easily automated; what WinRoute does admirably is pull your organizational data and display it in a manner that allows you to see how a specific server sees the routing table. This tool will not help you learn about routing groups, connectors, and the minutia of Exchange message routing if you do not already know the basics; it will help you learn how it applies to your configuration by seeing exactly how your servers are configured and how that information is replicating throughout your organization.