I am having trouble from home connecting to exchange 2003. I connect using a netgear vpn router. I have specific mapping in the file under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for the exchange server. What I wan to know is daily at 11:30pm exchange does a backup, while this backup is going on does the exchange server become unavailable to users?

Depends. Are you asking about a backup or Daily Maintenance? Daily Maintenance is run nightly and does not affect connected users. Backing up an Exchange server in "online" mode requires a backup agent.

It would be very unusual for the Exchange services to be shut down to perform a backup.I haven't come across any organisations performing off-line Exchange backups for many years :-) As stodj points out, an online backup does not preventclients from accessing the Exchange server. Tony www.activedir.org