Thursday, September 19, 2013

Autodiscover pains in my side.

Problem: When setting up Outlook 2007 on a Server 2003 R2 a certificate error is shown every time Outlook starts. Exchange server is 2013 and Autodiscovery is pretty much mandatory.

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Cannot connect to proxy server. Error code 10.

Symptom:s

Certificate error is shown at startup.

In the Outlook Anywhere settings, the proxyserver settings is set to the internal servername, like myserver.mydomain.local instead of the external mail.mydomain.com. The certificate is set to the external name so its no wonder Outlook complains.

When we alter the name in Outlook Anywhere settings the Proxyerror disappears. Though after restarting outlook once or twice, the settings returns.

Now the issue here is that these settings are only incorrect if the server (or computer) is a member of the domain. If a external Outlook puts up a user, everything looks fine in the Outlook Anywhere settings.

Cause:

Then looking for autodiscover settings, Outlook always looks to the domains SCP before the dns.

Now this can be amended by changing the parameters of cmdlet set-outlookprovider

Like : set-outlookprovider expr –server mail.mydomain.com –certprincipalname msstd:mail.mydomain.com and then restarting both mailserver and clientcomputer.

People usually solve the problem when doing that, but not in my case. I blame a very old server that probably upgraded Office one time to many.

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Solution:

In my case I had to completely bypass the Active Directory to fool the Terminal Server to look towards the DNS, where everything worked dandy.

These are the magic settings.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0 14.0 for Outlook 2010\Outlook\AutoDiscover and create these DWORD

"PreferLocalXML"=dword:0
"ExcludeHttpRedirect"=dword:0
"ExcludeHttpsAutodiscoverDomain"=dword:0
"ExcludeHttpsRootDomain"=dword:1
"ExcludeScpLookup"=dword:1 (forces Outlook to exclude SCP object check)
"ExcludeSrvLookup"=dword:1
"ExcludeSrvRecord"=dword:1

All cred for the fix goes to hosting.intermedia.net link below. Still pasting it here just in case they drop it.

On a side note, I also installed a brand new Server 2008 R2 with Outlook 2010 and didn’t see the issue there at all. So either something broke or Outlook 2007/Server 2003 bugged out.

References:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/umutg/archive/2011/01/31/all-about-set-outlookprovider.aspx

http://ilantz.com/2009/06/18/prevent-outlook-anywhere-aka-rpc-over-http-from-being-automaticly-configured-in-exchange-2007-with-autodiscover/

https://hosting.intermedia.net/support/kb/default.asp?id=2445

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