travis' brain dump

Anyone who has tried to set that up knows what I’m talking about. I actually got this all figured out a couple months ago but failed to make a post about how I did it, so today I found myself trying to remember what I did while trying to fix one of our other sites. So this time, I’m going to post it up.

The surprisingly common error you see when you setup ISA 2006 with Exchange 2007 and try to access ActiveSync manually is the following:

501 – Header values specify a method that is not implemented.

This is a good error actually, it means ActiveSync should be working fine, however, if your ISA server points to a EX2007 Client Access Server (CAS) which then proxies to other CAS servers in your environment, you may get a message like the following when trying to access a mailbox in another internal site:

405 – HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed.

At that point you start to question your sanity and your skills on Google as you can’t seem to figure out for the life of you why after all that work of making sure the configurations matched up on all your servers did it now not work? You can access the local CAS server directly and pick up the 501 but whenever you try to hit ActiveSync through the CAS Proxy it seems to just bomb on you.

Assuming the above is true and you can indeed connect to it directly, try looking at a few settings. In IIS Manager, look at the properties for ‘ Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync ‘ under your Default Web Site (or non-Default) and check on your settings for Handler Mappings and Authentication. You should have the following:

• Handler Mappings – Make sure the OptionsVerbHandler is configure for ‘All verbs’ not just ‘OPTIONS’
• Authentication – Make sure all Authentication options are disabled except for ‘ Basic Authentication ‘ and ‘ Windows Authentication’

If you’ve configured those settings, make sure your Proxy CAS and Target CAS are both running the same Exchange rollup version and reboot them. It should be working now.

Hopefully this will help some poor soul out there.

Mirrored on http://techtalk.homerun-networks.com/2009/03/25/multiple-exchange-2007-servers-isa-2006-activesync/