Administration of Outlook will on occasion involve correcting behavior related to the Name Service Provider Interface (NSPI) used for communications between Outlook and Exchange Server. The NSPI is used to communicate with the Global Catalog and resolve domain names and domain lookups. The protocol is known as emsabp32 and is comparable to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

During the course of operations you may sometimes get an alert indicating that the Name Service Provider Interface (NSPI) Proxy is able to communicate with the global catalog but it doesn’t support the NSPI service.

This error message can occur when running the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager. This pack is used to monitor the Windows Application log on systems that are running Exchange Server 2007. If it detects that certain events or a particular event has occurred, such as Event ID 9176 as shown in the log below, then it will generate the previous alert.  Such an event or events will look like this:

Product Name       Exchange
Product Version    8.0 (Exchange Server 2007)
Event ID              9176
Event Source        MSExchangeSA
MOM Rule
Path          Microsoft Exchange Server/Exchange 2007/Mailbox/System Attendant
MOM Rule Name   “Name Service Provider Interface (NSPI) Proxy can contact the global catalog, but it does not support the NSPI service.”

In addition you may also get a Description field such as: “NSPI Proxy can contact Global Catalog fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of server but it does not support the NSPI service. After a Domain Controller is promoted to a Global Catalog, the Global Catalog must be rebooted to support MAPI Clients. Reboot fully qualified domain name of server as soon as possible.”

When the Microsoft Exchange server contacts a server that has been designated to be a global catalog server it expects to get a response back from the Name Service Provider Interface (NSPI) on the global catalog. If it does not get a response then it is possible that the global catalog server has not advertised the NSPI. This can occur if the domain controller was not restarted after having been changed to a global catalog.

One very easy and obvious solution is to simply restart the global catalog. This restart will allow the MAPI clients to be supported and ensure that NSPI queries are serviced by the global catalog.

You should also confirm that the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service is running. If not, then you’ll need to start it and verify that the Startup Type shows as “Automatic”.

There are other problems that you may encounter when supporting an Exchange Server organization and Outlook clients. Problems can occur when one of your clients tries to make a connection to a global catalog server that is running Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and they receive a variety of error messages.

One of the error messages that can be generated will indicate that a bookmark is invalid. This can occur when an end user clicks on a folder shortcut on the Microsoft Outlook Bar. This can be a result of a domain controller that has been promoted to a global catalog server but has not yet been restarted.

Other issues you may have can include Outlook clients that are unable to resolve email addresses when a profile is being created. An error message you may receive would indicate that the name could not be resolved and that there might be a problem with the Exchange Server.

Additionally there may be problems that occur if an attempt is made to open a folder or set of folders. An error message would also indicate a problem with opening the information store.

All of these error messages can occur as a result of a Microsoft Windows  2000 Server domain controller that was not restarted after the domain controller was promoted to a global catalog server. The problem is that the Exchange Server tries to use the domain controller as a global catalog server.

If an administrator tries to create an Exchange profile and also connect to a Windows 2000 Server domain controller then an event will be generated in the event log as previously described above.

If you are running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 then you will not have this problem. So take this opportunity to upgrade to 2003 if you have not done so already.