Question : OWA and RPC over HTTPS stopped working suddenly

We're running Exchange 2003 (as part of SBS 2003), which is sitting behind an Astaro firewall (no ISA). Port 443 is forwarded from the Astaro to the Exchange/SBS box.

OWA and RPC over HTTPS have worked fine since the SBS was installed a few years ago. Yesterday, we had an extended power outage at the office. The UPS gracefully shut down the server and powered it up when the power came back on.

Now, I'm having a strange issue: If a user tries to access OWA, the login screen appears normally. After putting in credentials and clicking Log On, you can see it accessing owaauth.dll, but it just hangs and eventually times out.  The odd thing is that from the local network or if connected via VPN, OWA works normally.

With Outlook remotely, status shows it connected via HTTPS; however, it just keeps alternating between Trying to connect with Exchange and Connected....eventually changes to Disconnected, and no mail is every updated. Of course, when connected over the VPN, Outlook also works normally.

Any suggestions on what might have caused this and how to fix it? I've already done the following:

-Re-ran Internet and Email Wizard
-Restarted the SBS
-Restarted the Astaro firewall
-Checked firewall logs to ensure no port 443 traffic was being blocked--which it's not...all forwarding to SBS

Thanks in advance for any help!!

Answer : OWA and RPC over HTTPS stopped working suddenly

Thanks everyone for your help.

I finally got some information from Astaro, and it seems that Intrusion Protection Rule 8428 (must have been newly added, and just coincidental with power outage) causes an issue with OWA and Outlook over HTTPS. Once this IPS rule was disabled, everything was back to normal.