SMTP Reply codes are used to determine the error in the message, SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a standard protocol for sending emails, the client sends and the server responds, a response is with the 3 digit code which contains the meaning for the response with the codes, find the below SMTP reply codes
Choosing the right authentication method for Office 365 looks simple on paper, but when you get down in the weeds and take a closer look you may realize it’s not that easy.Choosing the correct authentication method is the first concern for organizations wanting to move their apps to the cloud.
This is the continuation article for Office 365 identity model. Let us see more about the identity model in this chapter.
As far we know until today, the best solution form the Microsoft point of view is, to use ADFS to authenticate on-premises users for cloud services such as Azure or Office 365. This is working very well and there are many articles about how to configure the clams etc. can be found in internet and also on my Blog.
However, if a company don’t want to use ADFS for authentication, there is another way Microsoft supports, but it is not so common like the ADFS solution. In this article I want to present an alternative way using AAD with Pass-through.
Please find the whole authentication progress here,
Federated identity offers some unique security options not available in other scenarios, but it also has the most requirements in terms of server infrastructure to implement. To enable federated identity, you need to deploy Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in an on-premise network. A typical deployment would be a two-server farm at separate sites (Azure has an option to add a second site for single datacenter customers). Two additional servers are needed in a DMZ (demilitarized zone, sometimes referred to as perimeter network) to securely publish ADFS to the internet. Once ADFS is in place, federated identity can be enabled with a few PowerShell commands.
Similar to pass-through authentication, user logon attempts are passed back to the ADFS farm to validate against your local active directory. Outlook 2013 or later will leverage modern authentication to communicate with ADFS. Web browsers will get redirected to the ADFS server to complete their authentication. This lets you use what’s called SmartLinks technology to allow users to logon directly to SharePoint online without entering a username or password.
You also have access to security features not available in other scenarios. You can enable client access filtering which lets you restrict access to Microsoft cloud services based on IP address (commonly used for hourly employees that shouldn’t be able to check email from home). You can also integrate with on-premise multi factor authentication servers (although you should be looking at Microsoft Azure options for MFA).
With the ever-increasing use of cloud computing, more and more businesses are making the switch to Office 365 for its cloud-based communication, collaboration and productivity abilities.Microsoft 365 or Office 365 supports several methods to migrate email, calendar, and contact data from your existing messaging environment to Microsoft 365 or Office 365
In this article we are going to see Office 365 Migration types available for Exchange to o365
When it’s time to choose between Office 365 migration types, below are the factors we need to consider before proceeding,
As the name suggests, staged migration is a method in which the accounts are split into batches before moving to Office 365. This is done over an extended period. Consider using staged migration in the following cases.
Some organizations might have to retain their on-premises servers while simultaneously moving to the cloud-based Office 365 services. Such a scenario can arise wherein admin wants to manage their AD accounts on on-premise while users can use Office 365 mailbox and services on the cloud.
One of the greatest benefits of MRS-based moves is that we don’t need to recreate Outlook profiles and re-download the OST after migration, because we keep the same ExchangeGuid and mailbox signature of the mailbox when it is moved. With hybrid remote moves, we migrate all the data that is contained in the mailbox and we cannot skip any data (like dumpster or junk folder)
Hybrid migration is a slightly more complicated process and is best outsourced to experts due to the complexities involved. There are several pre-requisites for the hybrid deployment most important of which is the version compatibility of the Exchange servers. The Office 365 subscription must include Azure Active Directory synchronization to support hybrid deployments. Then the appropriate permissions should be available for the deployment. The generic steps for hybrid migration could include:
A cutover migration is the simplest method to move mailboxes to Office 365. It is similar to staged migration except for the fact that all mailboxes are moved at once. Needless to say, the number and size of mailboxes are significantly smaller while opting for cutover migration.
While the other three Office 365 migration types depend solely on Exchange, an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) migration allows you to transition users from Gmail or any other email system that supports IMAP migration.
An IMAP migration pulls information from your source mailboxes and hands it over to Office 365. However, IMAP migration doesn’t transition anything other than email. Calendar items, tasks and contacts all stay in the original inbox and have to be migrated manually by the user.
You’ll also have to create a mailbox for each user before initiating the email migration – something other migration types automatically create for you.
IMAP migrations have a limit of 50,000 total mailboxes and 5,000,000 items. And once the migration is complete, any new mail sent to the original mailbox won’t be migrated.
The low disks space may lead to cause service outage to the customer if that unnoticed.
As we know most of the disk space gets occupied by log files and that could be any log files on windows or third party application running on windows.
Exchange servers can consume lot of IIS log files over time.As a best practice administrators configure IIS to store logs on a different disk to avoid problems, rest will wait for free disk space alerts and manually remove old logs from time to time.
This article will continue demonstrate the remaining step by step installation procedure for installing cumulative update for Exchange 2013 DAG
Once you done with the exchange virtual directories backup as mentioned in the part 1 make sure to export the configuration of Send & receive connectors . This result will help you to refer in case any mismatch occur in send & receive connector configuration post CU upgrade
Open exchange PowerShell and run the following commands to take the send and receive connector backups,
$FormatEnumerationLimit =-1
Get-sendConnector | fl | Format-List | Out-File “C:\sendconnector.txt”
Get-ReceiveConnector -Server | fl | Format-List | Out-File “C:\erver1_Receiveconnector.txt”
Prior to cumulative update upgrade disable third party and below services.This will help you to upgrade the cumulative update smoothly
In case if your organization / customer customized their owa page then you have to take the backup of owa theme from the following path
c:\program files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\FrontEnd\HttpProxy\owa\auth\15.0.1365\themes)
Starting with IE 7.0, server certificate revocation checking is enabled by default.You can disable this feature by clicking Internet Options on the Tools menu, selecting the Advanced tab, and uncheck the Check for server certificate revocation check box as shown in the figure. You need to restart IE in order for this setting to take effect.
Disabling the revocation check in production environments isn’t recommended, so you must make sure to enable it again after cumulative update upgrade. Certificate revocation checking protects your clients against the use of invalid server authentication certificates either because they have expired or because they were revoked (e.g., when a server certificate was compromised).
By default execution policy is Unrestricted. In case your organization configured the execution policy to RemoteSigned or Restricted then make sure to set the value to Unrestricted by using the following command
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Make sure to revert back the value to original once the cumulative update is over
You can download the cumulative update from Microsoft download center.In this article i am going to show you how to upgrade cumulative update 23 .You can download the cumulative update 23 from the below given link
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=58392
Once the cumulative update downloaded you can extract the file in to the separate folder.
Cumulative updates and Service Packs should be installed in the internet-facing site first, before installing in other sites in the organization.
Now the scenario we are going to see is upgrading the cumulative update on multi role server ( Mailbox , CAS & HUB ) infrastructure
So before start the upgrade, put the server in to the maintenance mode by manual or inbuilt script. Here we are going to use the inbuilt script to put the server in to maintenance mode
The entire process can be done from the Exchange Shell.
To start open EMS and go to:
C:\programs files\micrsoft\exchange server\v15\scripts
In the first step we put the first Exchange server In the DAG Into maintenance mode by typing the cmdlet below:
C:\programs files\micrsoft\exchange server\v15\scripts>.\StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 –servername Server1
Once run all DBs will move to the second Exchange server
To verify that the server is In maintenance mode type:
Get-databaseavailabilitygroup –status | fl name, server*
Cumulative updates can be applied using either the command line or graphical setup whichever you prefer.Follow the pre-installation processes outlined earlier in this article.
Do not run the upgrade from the Exchange Management Shell as this will cause it to fail due to locked files.
Run the upgrade from an elevated command prompt.
In an elevated command prompt run the following command from the location where you extracted the cumulative update files.
Setup /m:upgrade /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms
The command prompt window will display the progress as the upgrade proceeds.
After the cumulative update has been install restart the server once prompted to do so.
If you had placed the server into maintenance mode then you can run the inbuilt script for stopping maintenance mode after the installation is finished
C:\programs files\micrsoft\exchange server\v15\scripts>.\stopDagServerMaintenance.ps1 –servername Server1
Once the cumulative update completed on all servers you can use the in built RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script to redistribute the database based on activation preference
.\RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 –DagName DAG1 –BalanceDBsByActivationPreference –Confirm:$false
To verify and confirm the exchange build number post cumulative upgrade you can run the below command to list down for all servers as shown below
$servers=get-exchangeserver -identity servername*
$servers | foreach { Invoke-Command -ComputerName $_.name -ScriptBlock {Get-Command Exsetup.exe | ForEach-Object {$_.FileversionInfo} } }
Note : Above is the product version of Cumulative update 23 and Security Update For Exchange Server 2013 CU23 (KB4536988)
This article will demonstrate the step by step installation procedure for installing cumulative update for Exchange 2013 DAG
Microsoft will support last two cumulative update updates, so currently they will support cumulative updates 22 & 23 . The cumulative updates will get released every 3 to 6 months once.
Here is the wiki link for Microsoft to verify the CU built number and link for download the CU`s
You can use the following command to take the configuration backup of your environment especially virtual directories, which will help you in case if any configuration mismatch occur post CU upgrade
As mentioned earlier some cumulative update versions does required to update the active directory schema before actual exchange CU update
For Exchange 2013 , you can refer the below link for Exchange 2013 objects in Active Directory that get updated each time you install a new version of Exchange 2013. You can compare the object versions you see with the values in the table below to verify that the version of Exchange 2013 you installed successfully updated Active Directory during installation
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/prepare-active-directory-and-domains-exchange-2013-help
For Exchange 2013 CU update , below objects in Active Directory that get updated from the previous version
You can use the following commands to verify the object version and range Upper value in your environment before and after the schema update
([ADSI]”LDAP://CN=Microsoft Exchange System Objects,$RootDSE”).objectVersion
Below is the sample object version and range update value of the environment which captured before CU 23 upgrade
You can find the remaining procedure for cumulative update in Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update installation Best Practices – Part 2
