EqualLogic and Exchange 2010
We have had some problems with our EqualLogics (no surprise there) doing the most simple of thing, emailing through our exchange 2010 relay.
2003 worked fine, however 2010 seems to cause a number of problems. Small notification emails are fine, however, when it comes to the diagnostics emails with their vast 2-5MB attachments something chokes and we get a time out error at the EqualLogics end, something like
'diag' or 'update' was unable to send output using e-mail. SMTP returned the following error: TimeOut]
Some Googling suggests that it is either the Tarpitting Microsoft have stuck in that creates a 5 second delay to proceedings for security, or something a bit more deeper in the SMTP protocol on the receive connector on the CAS\Hub server, namely chunking and binary mime settings and it is all related to BDAT.
By default the Tarpitting is set to 5 seconds, some folks have found that setting this to 0 or turning it off works for them, it didn't for me, neither did setting the Inactive Time out or the Time Out values to 15 and 20 minutes.
So this leaves the other bits. I have tried to understand all the words and stuff around this but it is all techno babble. However, setting the BinaryMimeEnabled and ChunkingEnabled did fix the problem for me. However, I now have to understand what these settings are for and what is the effect on other systems using this connector if I disable them.
To disable you need to run some stuff from the Exchange command shell.
First to see what's what run
This should prevent any sending server from using the BDAT verb against Exchange and should cause them to default to the DATA command instead.
No change is without consequences and straying from default settings normally ends in grief, so you may wish to limit your changes to a separate connector, as we have, for EqualLogics and other systems that don't want to behave in a normal way, such as all those finely hand crafted SMTP servers that developers have created which may not take kindly to these new fangled methodologies. Got to love those developers that need to reinvent the wheel rather than using something easy that is built in to Windows like an SMTP server.
2003 worked fine, however 2010 seems to cause a number of problems. Small notification emails are fine, however, when it comes to the diagnostics emails with their vast 2-5MB attachments something chokes and we get a time out error at the EqualLogics end, something like
'diag' or 'update' was unable to send output using e-mail. SMTP returned the following error: TimeOut]
Some Googling suggests that it is either the Tarpitting Microsoft have stuck in that creates a 5 second delay to proceedings for security, or something a bit more deeper in the SMTP protocol on the receive connector on the CAS\Hub server, namely chunking and binary mime settings and it is all related to BDAT.
By default the Tarpitting is set to 5 seconds, some folks have found that setting this to 0 or turning it off works for them, it didn't for me, neither did setting the Inactive Time out or the Time Out values to 15 and 20 minutes.
So this leaves the other bits. I have tried to understand all the words and stuff around this but it is all techno babble. However, setting the BinaryMimeEnabled and ChunkingEnabled did fix the problem for me. However, I now have to understand what these settings are for and what is the effect on other systems using this connector if I disable them.
To disable you need to run some stuff from the Exchange command shell.
First to see what's what run
Get-ReceiveConnector
If you have a big environment or just lots of connectors like us that probably went bonkers and off the screen, so to narrow it down you need to find your connector with a shortened list
Get-ReceiveConnector | Select name
Should do the trick.
Once you have your connector you need to run the following
Set-ReceiveConnector -identity "connector name" -BinaryMimeEnabled $false -ChunkingEnabled $falseThis should prevent any sending server from using the BDAT verb against Exchange and should cause them to default to the DATA command instead.
No change is without consequences and straying from default settings normally ends in grief, so you may wish to limit your changes to a separate connector, as we have, for EqualLogics and other systems that don't want to behave in a normal way, such as all those finely hand crafted SMTP servers that developers have created which may not take kindly to these new fangled methodologies. Got to love those developers that need to reinvent the wheel rather than using something easy that is built in to Windows like an SMTP server.
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