Exchange

I’ve just fixed an issue with Routing for my mixed Exchange 2003/2007/2010 environment. The environment is a single AD domain with 4 sites, Site1, Site2, Site3 and Site4. In Site1, Site2 and Site3 there are 3 Exchange 2003 servers, one per site. In Site4 there is an Exchange 2007 SP2 server (CAS, Mailbox, HT). All the connectors required worked as expected, and inter-site routing works as expected. I introduced into the mix a 2010 Enterprise server (CAS, Mailbox, HT) to Site1 as a prelude to a full upgrade of the site to Exchange 2010.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time today trying to sort out my iPhone sync to my Exchange Server, failing miserably. It used to work, pre-upgrade to iOS4, but for some reason fails to sync. Symptoms were: iPhone fails to sync, generic timeout error (or is very slow) https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/ successfully tests the mailbox access The server was configured as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817379/en-us to allow OWA/ActiveSync with SSL on OWA. The iPhone was configured to accept the SSL certificate on the Exchange Server.

I’m currently testing an Exchange 2010 server for the organisation prior to a migration project, specifically testing moving mailboxes backwards and forwards. Something that confused me slightly for a few minutes was this: if there is an existing Move Request (pending, in progress, failed or completed) you will not see the “New Local Move Request” or “New Remote Move Request” - Fortunately this is very simple to counter – simply clear the old “Move Request” and the options will be back in the Mailbox options:

So I was testing the configuration on my Exchange 2003 server in preparation for the roll out of some Windows Mobile devices when I recieved the following error: Outlook(R) Mobile Access is supported only on Microsoft(R) Exchange Server 2003. Currently your mailbox is stored on an older version of Exchange server. Please contact your system administrator for additional assistance. “That’s odd”, I thought, “I only have Exchange Server 2003 in my organisation, how can I have an older version of Exchange?

I thought this would be fairly common knowledge by now, Exchange 2003 being quite mature in it’s 5th year, but it’s not something I’ve had a problem with before and therefore I’m going to write about it! So a big email comes in; lets say it’s 8MB. Your Exchange 2003 server, set to it’s defaults for size restrictions, rejects the email. Why? Take a look at this Exchange TechNet article:

We have a Bonded ADSL solution for our servers to provide the necessary upstream transfer speeds for the applications we host. We have bonded ADSL because our exchange still doesn’t support SDSL, and a leased line is overkill. Theoretically, we should have 28.1 Mbps download and 3.2Mbps upload - what I am actually seeing is about 1.7Mbps down and 1.9Mbps up. I have tested this on various servers, over various times and file sizes, there is no doubt that the performance is POOR.

Outlook Web access is a fantastic tool for our company, providing on-the-go access to people’s mailboxes - which is of course secured by SSL and uses Forms Based Authentication. Internally, we have an intranet portal that allows us to access the various systems - one of which is OWA. One of the stipulations for this internal portal is that it is all Single Sign On using NTLM authentication integrated authentication. This is where the problem lies because enabling OWA with Forms Based Authentication over SSL disables Integrated Authentication.

It seems that the nice people at Microsoft were looking out for us, lest the evil people in the world see how we categorise our email, and decided to strip away any category information from sent and received objects by default. Sure, I understand if you were categorising emails from someone as “sneaky git” or “numbnuts” then you might not be too happy about sending those out…but really it should be your choice right?

Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Integration\{GUID}\PID3.0 This was the case on a Windows Server 2000 install with Exchange Server 2003 installed, when I get the chance I will test this on Server 2003.