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Configuring an Anonymous Receive Connector on Exchange 2016

The Story

Well in my previous post I discussed the issue I faced resolving an email problem with one of our development applications in which it was unable to send emails after a recent Exchange upgrade/migration. So initially we were going to simply rebuild our own workflow in-house using ASP .NET Core. Until we noticed that even our own workflows were failing… in this case the answer from the old post which was super vague “reconfigure the receive connector”. Then I somehow stumbled upon my answer through one of my hundreds of google searches… I founds this gem!

OK before I link the gem which will be the source to my answer. I also wanted to point something out real quick here in hopes maybe someone can comment below the answer to this one:

When using Exchange 2016 as an email SMTP relay, and you use a no-reply from address, with an external email address for the destination, how do you query to find out if its gone through, or stuck in que? All I could see in the ECP it always required me to select a mailbox… there’s no mailbox associated with these relayed email messages, so how does one check this?

OK, now for the gem. This guy “Paul Cunningham” He’s… uhhhhhh… He’s uhhhhh… he’s uhhhh a good guy. So I always knew you could use telnet to check certain ports and services… but this was so concise… it nailed the problem…

From my K2 Server or my in house workflow server:

1)  Ensure Telnet Client feature is enabled

2) Open cmd prompt or PowerShell:

telnet exchangeServer 25
helo
mail from: user@corp.ca
rcpt to: ExternalUser@gmail.ca

220 EXSERVER.exchange2016demo.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at Thu, 22
Jun 2018 12:04:45 +1000
helo
250 EXSERVER.exchange2016demo.com Hello [192.168.0.30]
mail from: adam.wally@exchange2016demo.com
250 2.1.0 Sender OK
rcpt to: exchangeserverpro@gmail.com
550 5.7.54 SMTP; Unable to relay recipient in non-accepted domain

huh, just like the source blog, now why would I be getting that error… I allowed Anonymous users via the check box under the receive connectors security tab… yet Paul does a lil extra step that doesn’t seem to be  mentioned elsewhere, and that check box I mentioned is his first line, but then look at the interesting second line….

[PS] C:\>Set-ReceiveConnector "EXSERVER\Anon Relay EXSERVER" -PermissionGroups AnonymousUsers
[PS] C:\>Get-ReceiveConnector "EXSERVER\Anon Relay EXSERVER" | Add-ADPermission -User 'NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon' -ExtendedRights MS-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient

Since I was using anonymous settings on the Application server side (K2 in this case) I gave the second PowerShell cmdlet a run from my new exchange server.

Amazingly enough just like the source blog after running the second line (edited to fit my environment obviously) then the rcpt to succeeded!

20 EXSERVER.exchange2016demo.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service ready at Thu, 22
Jun 2018 12:59:39 +1000
helo
250 EXSERVER.exchange2016demo.com Hello [192.168.0.30]
mail from: test@test.com
250 2.1.0 Sender OK
rcpt to: exchangeserverpro@gmail.com
250 2.1.5 Recipient OK

Part 2 – The Solution

If K2 is configured to use EWS, check that stuff out elsewhere, if you landed here from my previous post looking for the answer to the “There is no connection string for the destination email address ‘Email Address'” and wanted to know how that person altered his receive connector:

[PS] C:\>Get-ReceiveConnector "EXSERVER\Anon Relay EXSERVER" | Add-ADPermission -User 'NT AUTHORITY\Anonymous Logon' -ExtendedRights MS-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient
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K2 SMTP Configurations

Intro

I’m going to keep this post short, just in hopes that I don’t go off the rails on this product; K2 Blackpearl 4.7. I have plenty of awesome SharePoint 2010 to 2016 migration content yet to post on my site. I’m sorry I wish I could get all the awesome things I do on here, there are many awesome things I keep thinking about; iOmega NAS conversion I did replacing the ix12 OS with FreeNAS, My test enviroment, ISCSI MPIO (VMware, Microsoft, linux configs)… anyway… K2…. ugh

The Problem

I’ve never posted about this product on my site before, cause to be frank…. I tried to stay away from it as much as possible, so all I did was update the base OS and pray that the developers or users didn’t complain about errors in any of the “K2 apps”. Trust me there are lots I can’t tell you how many times I had o hear about K2 issues… anyway, I digress. Ya’d figure it’s this simple eh… well for running the setup manager, for first time config sure… but you have to run it again if you want to ever change this value… *ahem*… alright so lets say you did this… it’ll just work right… you set the email server destination and port, it’s gotta work for everything in the server (We’ere talking standalone, not clustered). right?…. Nope… So you eventually find that this is the most common, and generic error you will find if you ever have any email issues with K2… “There is no connection string for the destination email address ‘Email Address'” and you will get this for a lot of different things. Which oddly enough some of it gets covered here. But it’s a mess, and you have no clue which problem is the cause for the error. So much like the shared link there:

Check 1 – Environment Variables

Check the Environment Variables (If you are not sure what Environment Variables are you can read this *Ahem* Awesome… WhitePaper)

Alright… so we re-ran the config manager, updated the email settings there, updated out environment variables, we gotta be good now!…..

“There is no connection string for the destination email address ‘Email Address'”

Check 2 – SMTP Config Strings

You got to be…… ok, ok…. we got this… there’s got to be something else we must have missed… let’s see… mhmmm as Mikhal says from here…

“Email configuration is externalized from process and K2 server relies on connection strings in configuration file, processes look at Environment Library, but you should also keep in mind String Table. I saw cases when people did update of Mail Server field in environment library, but their workflow was deployed from other environment with old/incorrect email settings which were written into String Table during deployment time – so you should also make sure that you have correct settings there.”

soooo… From K2 terrible support page you can either dig in and manually edit  “k2hostserver.exe.config” Really….. really….. .exe.config ….. anyway load the terrible Windows application that they use to edit this XML type config file. Now you mind find your self wondering “Do I have to create a new SMTP connection string for every from and destination address? That’s…. just…… unmanageable!” And yup it sort of is, what my awesome colleague and I discovered (He’s a K2 Master by the way) is that any internal “spoofed” mail (since we had decided we didn’t utilize any of K2’s EWS integration) would only work when we had that particular user with a SMTP string in this tool; ConnectionStringEditor.exe

It took my colleague a really long time before magically discovering what the syntax was in the SMTP connection string to be a wild card E.G. *@Zewwy.ca …. Drum Roll…….. NOTHING

That’s right nothing to make a wildcard SMTP connection string simply leave the field blank in the first step of the wizard. Alright… so now we had validated workflows could send on behalf of over SMTP based email (even to exchange without any EWS integration)… However we also utilized another workflow to send external email address emails…

“There is no connection string for the destination email address ‘Email Address'”

Check 3 – SMTP Receive Connector

Are you Kidding ME?!?!?! Alright…. Jesus what else did I forget/miss…

At this point you may find yourself a lil bit stuck as every other post points you to the same solutions above, or like this jerk-off goes over everything, then laughs in your face and says “‘There is no connection string for the destination email address testsmtp4velocity@gmail.com’. That is a pity. I thought we just added it. Ok, I admit, I knew this was going to be the result, but I thought I’d keep you intrigued. Now you will have to wait for my next article to see how to fix it. You can find the answer in part 2 of this article, along with a few other tips on how to resolve some other issues when trying to send an email through a SMTP server.” only to find that there is no Part 2….

So I was kind of stuck with the initial share I gave…

“Thanks for your help. We found the root reason is that the Exchange Server config the receive policy so we changed the policy then resolved the problem.”

If dealing with issues isn’t bad enough the internet is littered with useless help. “Don’t worry guys, I figured out my problem, if you have this problem too, well I figured out mine, good luck with yours.” Anyway, again I digress and I am not such a jerk and I will tell you how I finally managed to resolve this issue for good.

So I double checked my receive connector on my Exchange server… may there’s just something I missed… well… I covered everything, No TLS…. using Port 25, listening from only my K2 Server, Anonymous Users Checked off under security…  What the heck I have them all covered…

Check 4 – Part 2

I was at my wits end until this! (Part 2 LOLOLOLOL, for real though… it’s coming soon. in like 20-30 mins, maybe an hour shouldn’t take me long to write up)

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Setting Mailbox Subitem Permissions

I had to do this for Resource Items, to allow all staff to view the Calendar of the resource so they could schedule items accordingly. As one of the comments mentions from this Spiceworks post…

Set-MailboxFolderPermission "roomname:\Calendar" -User Default -AccessRights LimitedDetails

This can however be expanded on knowing powershell being object oriented, roomname is actually any mailbox, :\ is the delimiter, Calendar is the SubFolder. -User $Group or $User (Groups are usually best practice per IDGLA) and finally -AccessRights, you can specify any of the access rights you see in the pull down option of Outlook.

That’s it. that’s all there is to mangling Mailbox sub-item permissions.

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Splitting WordPress Titles
Post Headers

I wanted to do this since I noticed my one header being really long and was unsightly… I decided to google this, like I google everything…

First one I found, I didn’t want to dink with code, I like coding but mostly PowerShell (If you haven’t noticed based on my categories)… Sorry you’re out!

Second one I found, I didn’t like cause it used a plugin… However there’s always something great to learn form the comments, specially “pessimists” *Cough* realists such as this great comment by “KRZYSIEK DRÓŻDŻ”

“Wow, you really need a plugin for that?

Why don’t you just insert tag? Installing million plugins, that aren’t doing anything really isn’t a good idea… Especially, if such plugin is not popular, so very few people have looked at/controlled it’s code (this plugin had 30 active installs).”

Made me gooo, waaaaaa that’s it? So sure enough I add <br> in my Title, and Bam! The Title is split on 2 lines, now that was easy. Thanks Krzysiek!

Looks like my third source basically does the same thing.

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LegacyExchange Annoyance
(Exchange Cross Forest Migration Woes)

The Begining

I’m my quest to completely rebuild my company domain from the ground up (new Domain Controllers (Server 2016 Core), SQL 2016, SharePoint 2016, Exchange 2016….You get the idea) I’ve had to face many interesting challenges (not all blogged about just yet, but if you follow my TechNet posts you’ll see I have plenty of content to write about moving forward if I don’t come across interesting new things, at this rate that seems unlikely… anyway) This time it was another interesting one.

The Weekend

After spending the entire weekend combing over every little detail of the migration (Mail relays, systems that use email, how they send email, the receive connectors they would need (Auth types, TLS sec, etc) I figured I had all my bases covered, and made the switch (all changes including expanding existing server configs to allow mail flow, not hinder any) so the last part of my switch was ensuring most servers/services were using a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) in their settings/configs for SMTP. So my cut over in this case was very simple change the A host record, and clear all systems DNS cache. To my amazement everything was still working (even ActiveSync cut over without a hiccup)…. Until… the next day…

The Next Day

Out of all things I didn’t anticipate internal email flow to break… I mean… there’s nothing different between Joe.blow@corp.ca and Joe.blow@corp.ca right??!?! Wrong! lol with Microsoft Exchange you are totally, and utterly wrong! First… Read this and read this to understand exactly what I mean. In short internal email likes to use it’s own special address… (give a dirty look)… called X.500 addresses (AKA The LegacyExchangeDN) bunch of garbage, muff cabbage BS…. So instead of everything resolving normally cause all new linked mailboxes had the proper SMTP address (So all other outbound/inbound flowed without issue), user wanting to reply to old emails, or creating new ones and having the TO field be auto populated, they would get a stupid NDR (AKA a bounce back telling them the email can’t be sent to the recipient) cause FFS it can’t just use the SMTP address NOOOOOOOO it uses the stupid Legacy X.500 Address… Gosh Darn *Mumbles* Exchange… in case you can’t tell I dispise email with a passion.

The Search

Anyway, I looked up what the possible solutions were, I wasn’t too happy. For now I was telling people to simply remove the old Auto Populate cache Outlook was using. As for existing Calendar events, turns our all resources fell under the exact same annoying problem, even though I created them all with the same alias’s it wasn’t good enough Exchange was seeing them via their old X.500 addresses (Since all old Calendar Items were imported from Backup), they had new X.500 addresses in the new Exchange Server. So I would have to tell people to remove those resources, and simply re-add them.

The Problem

There is however a problem with this, and that is if someone edits an existing Calendar event and changes the time, the room may already have been booked (the new room) so when the user editing the old re-occurring event goes to re-add the room, it would complain about a conflict. Someone has already booked the “new” room even though it should have been held by the initial booking. Alright so how does one re-map this… well took me a while digging through google like this guy, or this guy (seems everyones a blogger these days), but I found an excellent resource blog that covers the problem, and the solution pretty clearly…

The Answer

To keep it short for everyone, and as usual to Paraphrase the solution, which so far is not even working for me :@, even after waiting 18 hours. *UPDATE!* Don’t put in X.500 like the stupid UI tells you to… just put in X500 without the ****ing dot… See my Technet post for details!

1)  Open User and Computers (From linked Domain/ Old Domain)
2) Find any User/Resource/Equipment object that were migrated
3) Right Click and select attribute editor tab (requires advanced view)
4) press "L" and lookup LegacyExchangeDN, double click and copy
5) Open Exchange ECP (New Server)
6) Under Recipients double click migrated mailbox, click email address
7) Add new email, Type X500, paste the address you copied in step 4
8) Wait for the OAB to synchronize across the farm and clients
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New-MailboxImportRequest Failed

This is going to be another short post.

Working on an Exchange migration this weekend, I was using our backup software to simply export users mailbox’s from the most recent backup of your old Exchange server, then importing them into the new Exchange server for each mailbox after creation.

I would have loved to have simply selected each user as a whole and import those pst files. However from testing showed it simply created a sub item with the users name and all their folders, instead of properly placing them under the primary parent hierarchy. So I was forced to export Each item individually (Inbox, Sent Items,Drafts, Etc) and Import them. I initially didn’t script this as there were only about 30-40 users I had to migrate, i figured it was easier to just go through the wizards… until I discovered some users created folders outside of their Inbox! Ohhh boy…. Anyway, turns out if you exceed 9 imports for a single mailbox without specifying a special name for it (even after they succeed) you will get en error as follows:

“The name must be unique per mailbox. There isn’t a default name available for a new request owned by mailbox xyz”

The solution was easy enough to find a good band-aid indeed.

Get-MailboxImportRequest -status completed | Remove-MailboxImportRequest

However sometimes in my case I found I was still getting there error even though I cleared all completed import requests (with default names obviously). I found out I was having a weird bug happen to be where imports where showing as Queued, yet if I piped them into Get-MailboxImportRequestStatstics | Select Status, they reported a status of Completed…(If you want all the details, pipe into Format-List, instead of Select)

Get-MailboxImportRequest -status Queued | Get-MailboxImportRequestStatstics | Select Status

lol I wasn’t sure what to make of this but there was 2 solutions.

  1. Clear the “Queued” imports that are really Completed.
  2. Give your new import a unique name using the -name parameter

I’ll admit though Exchange 2016 is more intuitive to manage then old Exchange 2010.

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Upgrading a Windows Volume from MBR to GPT to support EUFI boot and features

I’m going to keep this post short, so there won’t be any use of the TOC plug I recently deployed. 😛

I recently used a img of a sysprepped machine I used to deploy new machines. To my dismay the image was created with an MBR partition and was mostly used via BIOS boot options. This isn’t very secure as many of the security features of EUFI.

It’s been well known that moving from MBR to GPT back in the day was a painful process. I won’t go over the details as this “Microsoft Mechanics” video does a decent job of doing this.

If you’d like a little more nitty gritty details, you can view this Technet Blog.

In short:

  1. Boot into PE.
  2. use “mbr2gpt” command to validate and convert the partition.
  3. Boot into the Mainboard Config (Bios/EUFI)
  4. Configure boot option to EUFI

Now THAT was easy!

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Setup Subordinate CA (Part 3)

Intro

In this part we are going to:

Install the subordinate certificate authority
Request and approve a CA certificate from the offline root CA
Configure the subordinate CA for the CRL to work correctly

Required Permissions

You need to be a member of the Enterprise Admins group to complete these tasks.

Procedure

Installing Certificate Services

Just as with the offline Root CA, deploying Certificate Services on Windows Server 2012 R2 is simple, I stuck with PowerShell, view source blog for step-by-step GUI tutorial. Instal-ADCSCertificateAuthority?

Add-WindowsFeature -IncludeManagementTools -Name ADCS-Cert-Authority, `
ADCS-Web-Enrollment, Web-Default-Doc, Web-Dir-Browsing, Web-Http-Errors, `
Web-Static-Content, Web-Http-Redirect, Web-Http-Logging, Web-Log-Libraries, `
Web-Request-Monitor, Web-Http-Tracing, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Filtering, `
Web-Windows-Auth, Web-ASP, Web-ISAPI-Ext

DNS

In the source guide he talk about creating a CNAME record, since he set his offline Root CA CRL to point to “clr.blah.domain” in my case I specified the direct hostname of the CA. Maybe he did this for obfuscation security reasons, I’m not sure, either way I skipped this since an A host record already exists for the path I entered in the CRL information for the offline root ca.

Configuring Certificate Services

After the Certificate Services roles are installed, start the configuration wizard from Server Manager – click the flag and yellow icon and click the Configure Active Directory Certificate Services… link.

My CA server is core thus no GUI, thus no direct Server Manager. Connect to a client system that has required network access to run Server Manager and point it to the CA server. In this case I’ll be using a Windows 10 client machine. Run Server Manager, and add CA server as Domain/Enterprise Admin account.

Then just like the source blog guide, you should notice a notification at the top right requiring post ADCS configuration deployment.

Use a proper admin account:

Click Next, then select CA and CA Web Enrollment.

Click Next, Configure this subordinate certificate authority as an Enterprise CA. The server is a member of a domain and an Enterprise CA allows more flexibility in certificate management, including supporting certificate auto enrollment with domain authentication.

Click Next, Configure this CA as a subordinate CA. After configuration, we will submit a CA certificate request to the offline root CA.

Click Next, Create a new private key for this CA as this is the first time we’re configuring it. Now I’m curious to see what CertUtil reports after this wizard and what the RSA directories on the CA will contain. They should contain the keys, right?!

Click Next, leave the defaults, again simply going to use RSA @ 2048 Key Length, with a SHA256 hash checksum. Should remain the standard for hopefully the next 10 years.

Click Next,

Click Next, because this is a subordinate CA, we’ll need to send a CA certificate request to the offline root CA. Save the request locally which will be used later to manually request and approve the certificate. This is saved to the root of C: by default. Again oddly the initial Common name is auto generated into the request name with no option to alter it…

Moving along, click next, and specify the DB location. Generally leave the defaults.

Finally Summary and confirmation.

Click Configure and the wizard will configure the certificate services roles. Note the warning that the configuration for this CA is not complete, as we still need to request, approve and import the CA certificate.

Configuring the CRL Distribution Point

Before configuring the Certification Authority itself, we’ll first copy across the certificate and CRL from the root CA.

Ensure the root CA virtual machine is running and copy the contents of C:\Windows\System32\certsrv\CertEnroll from the root CA to the same folder on the subordinate CA. This is the default location to which certificates and CRLs are published. Keeping the default locations will require the minimum amount of configuration for the CRL and AIA distribution points.

The result on the subordinate certificate authority will look something like this – note that the CRL for the root CA is located here:

In my case it’s an offline (non domain joined) making a shareable UNC path is slightly painful in these cases, and for the most part, it is completely offline, and no NIC settings are even defined on the VM, heck I could remove the vNic completely :D. Anyway to complete this task I did the usual vUSB (a VMDK I mount to different VMs as needed to transfer files) and copied the resulting files specified above into this VMDK, then attached to the Sub CA VM, and moved files to their appropriate path. Again in this case the Sub CA is Core, so either use diskpart, or Server Manager from the client machine to bring the disk online and mount it.

Issuing the Subordinate CA Certificate

Next, we will request, approve the certificate request for the subordinate CA. At this point, the subordinate CA is un-configured because it does not yet have a valid CA certificate.

Copy the initial request created by the confiz wizard to the movable VMDK.

Now, remove the disk from the Sub CA and attach it to the Off-line root CA, then open up the CA tool to request a new certificate. (Don’t worry about taking the disk offline, it’ll unmount automagically).

Browse to where the certificate request for the subordinate certificate authority is located and open the file.

The certificate request will then be listed under Pending Requests on the root CA. Right-click the request, choose All Tasks and Issue.

The subordinate CA’s certificate will now be issued and we can copy it to that CA. View the certificate under Issued Certificates. Right-click the certificate, click Open and choose Copy to File… from the Details tab on the certificate properties.

Export the new certificate to a file in PKCS format. Copy the file back to the subordinate certificate authority, so that it can be imported and enable certificate services on that machine.

Configuring the Subordinate CA

With the certificate file stored locally to the subordinate CA, open the Certificate Authority console – note that the certificate service is stopped. Right-click the CA, select All Tasks and choose Install CA Certificate…

So from a client system open the CA snap-in, point to the new sub CA…

This is where I got stuck for a good while, all the guides I found online were using CA’s with Desktop experience enabled allowing them to run the CA MMC Snap-in locally, and from all my testing against a Server 2016 Core server running the CA role, the snap-in simply wouldn’t load the input wizard…

So I posted the bug on Technet, and Mark saved my bacon!

“You will need to use the commandline to do this. On the CA itself:

1) Open a command prompt

2) Navigate to where your certificate file is located

3) certutil -installcert <your certificate file name here>”

WOOOOOO! We have a working Enterprise Sub-CA… Now the question on if CRL works, and how to deploy the chain properly to servers and clients so things come up with a trusted chain and a green check mark!

“If the CRL is online correctly, the service should start without issues.

To be Continued…..