How to resolve “Network Path Not Found” in Exchange 2010 Management Console on an Edge or Hug transport server

 

All of a sudden one day my users started to report that emails were not arriving to the exchange mailboxes. When I looked into the queue of my Edge server the error mentioned above (An error occurred while accessing the registry on the server. Network path not found.) kept popping up when I tried to right click it and get properties. After some research many users get this error when accessing the properties of a transport server in the Exchange Management Console (EMC).

 

Many blame an update rollup from Microsoft but I´m not sure. The truth is that everything was working one day and the next it wasn’t for me. I did update the certificate my main exchange server was using but from other people comments it doen’t seem to be related. I´ve also read that this happens on a Hub transport or Edge transport server when you get the Antispam agent installed. The error that occurs should be similar to this:

An error occurred while accessing the registry on the server “ServerName”. The error that occurred is: “The network path was not found”. It was running the command ‘Get-AntispamUpdates -Identity ‘ServerName’.

 

 

The solution that worked for me was the following:

1. Enable File and Printer Sharing – go into the properties of your network connection on the server and make sure that File and Printer Sharing is enabled. This should not be an issue on an internal facing interface. In my case making the change didn’t do the trick right away. After I rebooted the server things were working fine once again.
2. Start the Remote Registry Service – open the Services panel under Administrative tools and make sure that the Remote Registry Service is running and configured for automatic startup. In my case the service was running and set to automatic so this was not part of the problem. If you had this service stopped and re-starting it didn’t solve the issue, try to reboot as in the case above a restart of the machine is required in some cases.

 

Make sure you do this on all your edge and hub transport servers. Good luck!