Using your browser to check Exchange 2013 protocol health

Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes you're not at work and you suspect there is something wrong with your Exchange 2013 servers and you can't access your environment remotely for whatever reason. Well, in some cases you can check this with just a browser. For each Exchange protocol, there is an URL you can use to check the health. The format would be: https://<External FQDN>/<protocol>/healthcheck.htm If the specific protocol is working correctly, the Exchange server will respond with: 200 OK SERVER.CONTOSO.LOCAL The server.contoso.local would be the

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My portable lab hardware

Reading Time: 2 minutes Recently somebody asked via Twitter my what the make and model is of my laptop, used for Exchange testing environments. Well, 140 characters is not a lot of space so I decided to blog about it. Our company uses Dell laptops as a laptop standard, but other vendors might have comparable configurations. The main model type is a Precision M4700, but for lab purposes the configuration has been customized: CPU: Intel Core i7-3820QM @ 2,70GHz Memory: 32GB (4x8GB) 1600MHz DDR3

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Simplifying the OWA URL with Citrix Netscaler

Reading Time: 3 minutes Next to Content Switching (which I recently wrote a post about), Citrix Netscalers can also do URL Rewrites. This enables us to simplify the OWA URL. First, be sure the Rewriting option is enabled by going into System, then Settings and choose Configure Basic Settings. Check the tick box for Rewrite After this, first make an Rewrite Action by going to Rewrite>Actions and add an Action. Give it a comprehensive name and set the type to REPLACE. In the Expression

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Load balancing Exchange 2010 with Citrix Netscaler using Content Switching

Reading Time: 4 minutes Next to F5, KEMP technologies and a lot of other network load balancing vendors there’s also Citrix with it’s Netscaler brand. Especially when an environment also has Citrix servers, it could mean that well scaled Netscaler devices are present and can also be used for other purposes next to Citrix Secure Gateway access. Obviously Exchange 2010 comes to mind. Citrix already has a very helpful Netscaler Exchange 2010 deployment guide (PDF warning). But unfortunately that guide is not always something

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Exchange SSL Offloading and the upcoming update blocking certificates with RSA key length less than 1024bit

Reading Time: 2 minutes Microsoft announced yesterday new approach regarding the validation of certificates coming in august this year. Certificates with a key length less than 1024bit will be blocked: Adding to our defense-in-depth measures, in August, we will release a change to how Windows manages certificates that have RSA keys of less than 1024 bits in length. Once this key length update is released, we will treat all of these certificates as invalid, even if they are currently valid and signed by a

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