RPC over HTTP 1

[Quigonspencer]

I have moved my external E-mail to be received through my 2003 small business Server and every thing is working great except I have an employee who works at a remote location and he needs to be able to access his email through outlook 2003. I have looked into RPC over HTTP and done the server and client setup that I found but when I go to receive it says that the server can not be reached, I am able to receive the mail from the IP/exchange remotely but I would like him to have the functionality that RPC offers. Any help would be great!!

Thanks Devin

 

[AndyPeck]

There are several good articles here, including some stuff on ISA server should help you get it up and running

http://www.msexchange.org/

For more of ISA see. (a sister site to the exchange one)

http://www.isaserver.org/

 

[Quigonspencer]

Let me specify… I am in a single server environment… Windows 2003 Small business server I have done everything I can find on how to setup the server and client but the client can not connect to the server, I have also allowed ALL access through my firewall (temporality) to make sure that is not what is blocking it and it still does not work

 

[pdtit]

QuigonSpencer,

I understand your concern; Me as well followed all documentation available.

However, I found a solution which as of then helped me in configuring RPC with a lot of customers already in the meantime.

As you may know already, you have to configure HTTPS for using RPC over HTTP Tunneling. HTTPS means you have to use a SSL certificate to establish the communication.

In most cases, installing both created SSL certificate files (root certificate from your CA and certificate for SSL communication) on your client machine makes it possible to communicate with each other.

If more info is needed, feel free to post back.

Regards,

Peter

 

[Quigonspencer]

thanks pdtit

The ssl certificate is the one from small buisness server ? that my be my problem, I may not have the ssl corect

 

[pdtit]

Spencer,

Correctly; I'm not sure for SBS if it is created automatically or not. These are the steps involved on a "regular" exchange setup :

a) create a certificate using the Windows certificate authority (add / remove programs - windows components)
this is the root certificate for your company as you can call it.

b) configure the RPC Virtual Directory from within IIS (Internet Information Server) to use an SSL certificate; this certificate will be created based on your root certificate

c) when browsing to

https://servername/RPC

it should give you a prompt for security (SSL certificate), which means it is configured correctly.

d) copy both root certificate and SSL certificate to your "client PC" and install them by double-clicking on them. As of now, RPC tunneling over HTTP(s) should work.

A small remark but I think you are aware of this :
requirements are Windows XP SP1 + 2 hotfixes (search on RPC config on the MS Knowledgebase) or XP2 + Outlook 2003.

Serverside is Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003.

I hope you find your way to work it out.

Regards

Peter

 

[Quigonspencer]

Any Idea where those 2 certificats are located ?

 

[zacca]

Hi Peter,

If you're going to use rpc over http both internally & externally, I strongly recommend you to purchase a real ssl cert from vendors like verisign, thwate, geotrust, etc

It will ease your install/config tasks on each workstation for importing the "self-cert", really worth for.

 

[Quigonspencer]

Zacca,

This is what I have read, but I really don't want to have to do that untill I am 100% that this is going to work for us, I want to get this up and running and tested before I spend the extra expence

Peter, please continue !

 

[Quigonspencer]

Peter,

I also changed the SSL Settings as you specified, now weboutlook comes up and says that this server is requireing you to have a certificate installed and to choose from the list but there are not any in the list ? Think I have to specify on the server settings where the certs are ??


Devin