Category: networking

  • Exchange Move Requests | Large Items | And Setting TCP KeepAliveTime To A Large Value

    I have seen this situation a number of times. A large mailbox (or mailbox and archive) wont move to the target because the process of checking what the changes are in the mailbox take too long, the network or Exchange Server times out the users move and then reports the mailbox is locked. The fix…

  • Office 365 and ACDC

    The best connectivity to Office 365 is achieved with local internet breakout and local DNS egress. This means things like each branch office should connect directly to the internet and not via the Head Office and then to the internet and that DNS lookups are done local as well. The reason for DNS lookups is…

  • Slow Virtualization Networking

    I had a complaint from a customer today that there new virtual server with lots of resources was too slow on copying files and could I take a look. So I did! The virtual server was connected to a 1GB switch via two different network cables. One was configured in the Hyper-V virtualization software as…

  • Secret NSA Listening Ports in Exchange Server 2013? Of Course Not…

    But what do those extra ports in Exchange Server 2013 that are listening actually do. If you bring up a command prompt on an Exchange Server 2013 machine and run netstat –ano | find “:25”. You will get back a list of IP addresses that are listening on any port starting 25. The last number…

  • Installing and Configuring AD RMS and Exchange Server

    Earlier this week at the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC 2012) I led a session titled Configuring Rights Management Server for Office 365 and Exchange On-Premises [E14.314]. This blog shows three videos covering installation, configuration and integration of RMS with Exchange 2010 and Office 365. For Exchange 2013, the steps are mostly identical. Installing AD RMS…

  • Creating GeoDNS with Amazon Route 53 DNS

    UPDATE: 13 Aug 2014 – Amazon Route 53 now does native GeoDNS within the product – see Amazon Route 53 GeoDNS Routing Policy A new feature to Exchange 2013 is supported use of a single namespace for your global email infrastructure. For example mail.contoso.com rather than different ones for each region such as uk-mail.contoso.com; usa-mail.contoso.com…

  • HTTPS Load Balancer Issues with Exchange 2010 SP2

    When you install Service Pack 2 (and maybe SP1 too) on Exchange 2010 it resets the SSL flag on the root directory of the IIS website. You might have removed this setting for a number of reasons, mainly to do with having a HTTP to HTTPS redirect, but it can also be removed if you…

  • Exchange Log Truncation Failure in a DAG

    Today I visited a client who had noticed that no log files had ever been removed after any backup within Exchange 2010 SP1. It was fortuitous that they had enough log disk space for about eight months of log generations. The disadvantage was that we were four months into this time period, so it was…

  • GoDaddy SSL Certificate Approval with TXT Records

    I had a bit of an issue with Go Daddy yesterday in that they took 5 days to approve a Subject Alternative Name change to a certificate, and as the usual route of adding a file to a website was unavailable to me I decided to prove ownership of the domain by the addition of…

  • Configuring an SSTP VPN on Small Business Server 2008

    SSL based VPN’s are great. In short it is VPN without firewall or NAT issues (both of which you get with PPTP and IPSec VPN’s). But SBS 2008 does not enable SSTP VPN’s by default. It uses RRAS, so SSTP is possible, but it is not as easy as it first looks! The following is…