XCON: Free Form Name Attribute not Handled by Sprint (161946)

SYMPTOMS

Connectivity between the Microsoft Exchange X.400 Message Transfer Agent (MTA) and a foreign Sprint X.400 gateway cannot be established. The Sprint gateway may indicate that messages from Microsoft Exchange contain an invalid property in the ASN.1 header.

CAUSE

The Sprint X.400 gateway does not support the Free-form Name (FFN) attribute in the Domain Defined Attribute (DDA) field of a message. The inclusion of a Free-Form Name is optional, but support for it is mandatory. The Sprint X.400 gateway should ignore the field if it chooses not to use it, but must be able to receive it in a message.

The Free-form name is not part of the O/R Address, it is a "friendly name" field for which support is mandatory. References to this support is located in the Red Book X.420 3.2.1 and the Blue Book X.420 7.1.3 discussion of ORDescriptor. The syntax of this data is TeletexString.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem:

Contact Sprint about the availability of an X.400 gateway software revision that supports this attribute correctly, or obtain this hotfix from Microsoft.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Exchange version 4.0. This problem was corrected in the latest Microsoft Exchange 4.0 U.S. Service Pack. For information on obtaining the service pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

S E R V P A C K

MORE INFORMATION

The issue may be accompanied by a number of Event Id 316's in the Windows NT Event Log:

   Event Id:316
   Source:MSExchangeMTA
   Type:Information
   Category:Resource
   Description:[MTA MAIN BASE (1) Proc 15] 
   Free ASB at index 2001
   This leaves 1 CB's remaining (4)

The following Event Id 316's will document the index in an incrementing manner (2001, 2002, 2003...).