Posts in category Mail Platforms

Gotcha – Integrating Lync On-Prem with Exchange Online UM

Jan26
2012 1 Comment Written by JB

As part of our (Provoke’s) recent migration of our corporate email to Office 365 and Exchange Online, we wanted to include migration of the Exchange Unified Messaging role to Exchange Online as well. Simple enough, and the UCGuys have a superb post that breaks down the process in real simple terms.

However..

We struck an issue after completing the process whereby calling voicemail, or trying to dial the UM dial-in numbers failed. Checking the logs revealed an error along the following lines:

ms-diagnostics: 1036; reason=”Previous hop shared address space peer did not report diagnostic information”; source=”<fe-server>”; dialplan=”Hosted__exap.um.outlook.com__<multipleSMTPdomains>”; umserver=”exap.um.outlook.com”;responsecode=”503″; msexchDomain=”<primarySMTPdomain>”; msexchPeerServer=”exap.um.outlook.com”; msexchsource=”<edgeaccessfqdn>”; appName=”ExumRouting”

Followed by:

ms-diagnostics: 15030; reason=”Failed to route to Exchange Server”; source=”<fe-server>“;dialplan=”Hosted__exap.um.outlook.com__<multipleSMTPdomains>“; appName=”ExumRouting”

Turns out we (and by that I mean me) had made an error when running the command:

New-CsHostedVoicemailPolicy -Identity Office365UM -Destination exap.um.outlook.com -Description “Hosted voice mail policy for O365 users.” -Organization “domain.com”

In my desire to validate blog posts before blindly following them (crazy right!), I’d checked the UCGuys’ NewCsHostedVoicemailPolicy  syntax against the Technet cmdlet library for New-CsHostedVoicemailPolicy, which states for the Organisation field..

This parameter contains a comma-separated list of the Exchange tenants that contain Lync Server 2010 users. Each tenant must be specified as an FQDN of the tenant on the hosted Exchange Service.

Which I duly interpreted as meaning all SMTP domains associated with the Exchange Online tenant – of which we had three. Especially as the example syntax at the bottom of the article does exactly that.

Turns out, that aint gonna fly.

For Exchange Online UM, you must specify one domain only in the Organisation field. And that domain must be one that Exchange Online is authorative for. If you’ve done a cutover migration, that will mean you can probably use your primary SMTP domain, as by dint of the cutover, Exchange Online will be authorative for that domain. However if you’ve done a hybrid migration, chances are good that your on-premise Exchange platform is still authorative for your primary SMTP domain. So best option here is to use your <customer>.onmicrosoft.com domain, as Exchange Online will always be authorative for that one.

This is briefly outlined at the end of the Connect Lync Server 2010 to Exchange Online UM Checklist from Microsoft.

Posted in Exchange, Exchange Online, Lync, Office 365, Unified Comms - Tagged , ,

Migrating SmarterMail 5.5 to 8.0 and IIS7

Mar20
2011 Leave a Comment Written by JB

Like any good SysAdmin, I have a private hosted server on which I run my own mailsever and websites, and generally use as a bit of a sandbox for testing stuff out. Judge me if you will.

My particular server is a VPS hosted by the awesome folks at KickAssVPS (they seriously do btw), and I recently decided it was overdue for an upgrade from Server 2003 to Server 2008. No worries – just a case of migrating some websites from IIS6 to IIS7 (sadly not IIS7.5 – R2 not available at KickAss yet). What I hadn’t planned on was finding out my mailserver software was 3 major versions old – SmarterMail 5.5 to be precise – and version 8 had just dropped that week. Too good to pass that up. Shiny!! Must have!

So, now I’m migrating from Server 2003 to Server 2008, IIS6 to IIS7, .NET2 to .NET4, and SmarterMail itself from 5.5 to 8.0. I’ll admit I started to wonder if I’d just made a foolish mistake.

Migration attempts 1 and 2 were a nightmare. Mail service refused to start, webmail couldn’t connect to services, and general hair-pulling ensued. Google unfortunately didn’t have the answers – seemed nobody had tried this particular array of upgrades in one go before. I was in no-mans land. It’s lonely there.

But eventually, I figured it out. If you’re curious, here’s how…

There is a minor but crucial step missing in these instructions (or was when I wrote this – SmarterMail tell me they’re updating them soon). By default, your application pool will be set to run under .NET2. Change this to .NET4 or you’ll get an error popup in IIS about “configuration section ‘system.web.extensions’ cannot be read because it is missing a section declaration” (because the ‘.extensions’ bit is new in .NET4). Like I said, minor but oh so crucial.
  • Stop the SmarterMail service on both servers
  • Copy the following XML files from the SmarterMail program folder on the old server to the same place on the new server: (assumes x64 OS)
C:Program Files (x86)SmarterToolsSmarterMailServicemailconfig.xml
C:Program Files (x86)SmarterToolsSmarterMailServicedomainlist.xml
C:Program Files (x86)SmarterToolsSmarterMailServicegreylistbypass.xml
C:Program Files (x86)SmarterToolsSmarterMailServicegreylist.dat
  • Copy the contents of the entire mailbox folder located (by default) at C:SmarterMailDomains to the same place on the new server.
  • Recursively delete all copies of mailbox.cfg from the C:SmarterMailDomains folder (“del /S mailbox.cfg” will do the trick). Restart the SmarterMail service on the new server.
  • This resolves a problem whereby large numbers of emails show in webmail as ‘email no longer exists on server’. The mailbox.cfg file gets rebuilt automatically when you login to webmail, so don’t panic about deleting it.
  • Restart the SmarterMail service on the new server.
  • Retrieve beer from fridge
  • Open beer and enjoy.

Bare in mind this doesn’t take into account your need to plan your MX record cutover process. If you’re managing a mail server, I’d expect you to understand how that bit works without having to explain it.

SmarterMail 8 is a massive improvement by the way. Faster, much sexier to look at, and just generally betterer.

 

Posted in SmarterMail - Tagged ,

DISCLAIMER

All opinions are my own, and do not respresent the opinions of my current or any previous employer.

Credit is given where it is due, so I'd expect you to do the same.