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.”

Continue reading Global Catalog Server Errors and Outlook