XCON: Managing Connections in Exchange 2000 Server and Link State Definitions

This article provides information about managing connections in Exchange 2000 Server and provides basic definitions of possible link states.

An active connection is needed to allow messages to be transported out of a link queue.

There are only two global actions that you can perform on all the queues in a given SMTP virtual server, a Message Transfer Agent (MTA), or connector: Disable All Connections or Enable All Connections. These actions are performed at the main Queues node. Depending on the protocol (SMTP, X.400, or MAPI) these commands may not affect system queues.

In individual link queues, the following commands are used to manage connections:

• Enable Connection
• Disable Connection
• Force Connection

If a link between a queue and the next-destination server is not connected, its Connection State will be Disabled. If a link between a queue and the next-destination server is connected, the Connection State is Enabled, and can be any of the following: Active, Ready, Remote, Frozen, Retry, or Scheduled. These states are defined in the table below.

Force Connection allows administrators to create an Active link connection. If the server determines the connection to be remote, the state is changed to Remote (the server makes this change).

Note: Although Remote, Retry, and Scheduled are valid connection states, the administrator is not able to enforce them because they are determined by Exchange.

The following definitions are basic definitions of possible Link States in Exchange 2000 Server: