Moving On Up!

This blog has been moved to a shiny new WordPress site running in Microsoft Azure!  Actually, it's still a default template, but I'll try to dress it up a bit.

The new URL is http://www.crosbysite.com.

I know the blog's been idle for a while, but I'm hoping change that in the near future.

FIM 2010 R2 High CPU with Mmsscrpt.exe

I recently had issue in which mmsscrpt.exe would peg one CPU and hang indefinitely during an sync to the FIM Service MA.  My environment is a single Windows Server 2008 R2 box.  My run sequences consisted of delta imports and delta sync to my two data MAs (SQL and AD) and to the FIM service.  These were followed by an export and a delta import delta sync to the same MAs.  All was fine until the final delta import and delta sync ran.  When it did mmsscrpt.exe jumped to consume one thread and the runs effectively stopped.

Also, a run of full imports and full syncs on all MAs did not show the problem, it was only when the exports were introduced.

In an effort to fix it, I upgraded my FIM 2010 R2 from RTM (4.1.2273.0) to Hotfix Rollup 1 (4.1.2548.0) – no change.

I found a similar issue on the FIM Forum, but it was caused by a .Net Framework bug.  I already had all of the current updates, so those hotfixes were not relevant to me.  However, it was mentioned in there that turning off Exchange 2010 provisioning caused the issue to go away.  The same was true for me, which was the light bulb moment – PowerShell.

In my environment I had deployed the Windows Management Framework 3.0 (PowerShell 3.0, WMI, & WinRM) so that I could use Server 2012’s Server Manager with the older operating systems.  I figured PowerShell 3.0 was breaking something with the remote PowerShell call done when provisioning Exchange, so I went to remove WMF 3.0.  In doing so, I noticed that I apparently had deployed the WMF 3.0 BETA.  I removed it, rebooted, and the issue was gone.

Finally, after realizing it was a beta, I download the current installer for WMF 3.0 (RTM) and installed it.  After another reboot, the issue did not return.

So, the bottom line is that the WMF 3.0 Beta is incompatible with FIM 2010 R2 (not tested with FIM 2010, but I’d be willing to bet it causes issues there too).

TMG 2010: Outbound FTP Pain

Another TMG blog post… :)

Was working with a client to replace an ISA 2004 server with a TMG 2010 server.  Both were configured as the clients only firewall, and clients were configured to be both SecureNAT and Web Proxy clients.

The issue was with outbound FTP traffic (internal users access external FTP sites).  When configured as SecureNAT (no proxy configuration in IE) FTP worked fine.  When the client was configured as a Web Proxy client (proxy configured to “Automatically Detect Settings” or proxy server hard set to the IP/name of TMG), FTP would time out and fail to connect to various FTP sites.

The clients are configured to do passive FTP.  As it turns out, when a SecureNAT client uses FTP, TMG connects to the external site with passive FTP.  And when a Web Proxy client uses FTP, TMG connects to the external site with active FTP, which often fails.

The solution is to use a little documented setting in TMG to force the use of passive FTP for Web Proxy clients.  So little documented that all the links refer to ISA 2006.  To resolve, set the DWORD value NonPassiveFTPTransfer to 0 in the registry on the TMG server, which sets the mode to Passive. The default value is 1, indicating that Active mode is used.  The value will likely need to be created and it goes here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/W3Proxy/Parameters

It is also likely that you will need to create the Parameters key.

Make the change and restart the Microsoft Firewall service.

This particular issue is actually documented here and here, but refers to ISA 2006/2004/2000 and is obscure enough that you probably won’t find it unless you know exactly the right keywords to search for.

On a related note, here is the single best article I have seen on working with FTP on ISA and TMG:

http://microsoftguru.com.au/2010/08/27/troubleshooting-outbound-ftp-access-in-isa-tmg-server/

TMG 2010 and Exchange 2010 Resource Forest: Fun with NTLM and Outlook Anywhere

I recently wrapped up a large TMG deployment in support of a new Exchange 2010 resource forest and there were a lot of lessons learned (read: issues that needed to be overcome), so I figured I would try to capture the main ones for the blogosphere.

Part 3 of 3 – Fun with NTLM and Outlook Anywhere

This article assumes a fairly decent knowledge of both TMG and Exchange. It is not meant to be a detailed step-by-step configuration guide. All steps should be tested prior to production rollout.

Before I get into the issue in detail, a little background on the environment. A new Exchange resource forest was built to host Exchange for two separate forests/domains where the user accounts lived.  Everything in the resource forest was built on Windows Server 2008 R2.  TMG is in the same forest and domain as Exchange and Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) is configured. TMG must be in the same domain as whatever is being published in order to use KCD. With KCD configured, our testing from a Windows 7 PC showed that Outlook Anywhere was working perfectly and not prompting for credentials when opening Outlook.

In another round of testing (from an XP PC in a different domain), the user was prompted for authentication. After reviewing all TMG settings and watching TMG logs, it did not appear to be a TMG issue. To test, we forced the client to go direct to a CAS server by editing the host file. They were still prompted for authentication. We tried fetching all windows and office updates, no luck. Since my Windows 7 test PC in the first domain was working perfectly, we decided to try a Windows 7 PC joined to the second domain. The Windows 7 PC in the second domain worked perfectly directly to the CAS (no prompts) and worked perfectly to TMG. So TMG is off the hook here.

The issue, as it turns out, is that Server 2008 R2 is only taking NTLMv2 authentication by default, but the default setting on Windows XP is to only allow LM and NTLM authentication, and never NTLMv2.  The authentication methods are controlled by the LmCompatibilityLevel registry key, found at HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa.

Rather than dumbing down the Server 2008 R2 CAS servers, the client changed the LmCompatibilityLevel on the XP workstations from the default value of 0 to the new value of 2 through Group Policy.  The default value of 3 was left alone on the CAS servers.  No more authentication prompts!

 

Part 1 of 3: TMG 2010 and Exchange 2010 Resource Forest: Redirection to Legacy Exchange 2003

Part 2 of 3: TMG 2010 and Exchange 2010 Resource Forest: OWA Login Issues (Account is Disabled??)

TMG 2010 and Exchange 2010 Resource Forest: OWA Login Issues (Account is Disabled??)

I recently wrapped up a large TMG deployment in support of a new Exchange 2010 resource forest and there were a lot of lessons learned (read: issues that needed to be overcome), so I figured I would try to capture the main ones for the blogosphere.

Part 2 of 3 – OWA Login Issues (Account is Disabled??)

This article assumes a fairly decent knowledge of both TMG and Exchange. It is not meant to be a detailed step-by-step configuration guide.  All steps should be tested prior to production rollout.

This particular issue started happening when I enabled the ability for users to change their passwords from the TMG login page.  Immediately after that, when logging on to OWA with an account from the account forest (which is the account connected to the Exchange 2010 Linked Mailbox), TMG says the account is disabled (and it’s not).  One of the key items here is that the sAMAccountName is the same on both accounts.

I found a KB article about the exact same issue but for ISA.  The issue is in the additional things TMG does behind the scenes during login to determine password age and expiration.  It stops on the first account it finds, which is the one in TMG’s local domain, which is in fact disabled as it is in the resource forest, so you are denied.  To verify, we turned off the password stuff in TMG and it began to work properly again.  The fix for the ISA issue was to apply a hotfix, then run a script to enable the new functionality.  Since TMG uses the same code base as ISA, I made the assumption that the hotfix code was already part of TMG and all we would need to do is run the script.  The assumption turned out to be correct, just run the script in the KB article below on your TMG servers.  I think you only need to run it on one server in each array (didn’t make a note of that), but it won’t hurt to run it again on each node.

Associated ISA KB: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952675

 

Part 1 of 3: TMG 2010 and Exchange 2010 Resource Forest: Redirection to Legacy Exchange 2003