I read your expert answer Checking logs for OWA logon attempts. I was wondering if you could point me somewhere that would tell me how to read those logs. I am a little concerned after looking at some of them. For example, I see a lot of lines like this:
GET /exchange/ - 80 - xxx.xxx.x.x Mozilla/4.0 401 2 2148074254. (The x's are replacing an IP address.)
Are these lines normal, or is that someone trying to hack into our system?
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It is perfectly normal to see a number of GET commands in the IIS World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) logs. Outlook Web Access is extremely log intensive. There will be an overwhelming amount of log entries -- as you've discovered.
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Related information from SearchExchange.com:Tip: Exchange Server diagnostics: An introduction to application and system logs
Tip: Exchange Server diagnostics: Digging into IIS logs
Resource Center: Monitoring and logging tips and resources
Free Download: Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool
The log format is based off of the W3C's extended log file format. For troubleshooting purposes, it is possible to have additional information logged.
In the following example, notice that, in addition to what you are logging, there is also a domain and username being logged:
2005-08-05 00:25:05 192.168.1.11 GKrich.luckett 192.168.1.250 80 GET /exchange - 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.01;+Windows+NT+5.0;+DigExt)
Learn more about the format here.
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This was first published in December 2005
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