Error 0x800706D9 deploying Exchange 2010 Client Access Servers

As part of a large scale migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 I’ve been installing  a number of Client Access Server using the SP2 binaries of Exchange 2010

The servers displayed the error below when installing the Client Access Server role complaining about End Point mappings

 

After digging around the ExchangeSetup.log file located in the C:\ExchangeSetupLogs folder I noticed that setup was trying to configure some firewall rules

I checked the status of the Firewall and sure enough it was disabled.

All servers were deployed from a template which has the firewall disabled.

I uninstalled Exchange from the server, set the firewall to Automatic and rebooted.

After the reboot the Exchange Client Access role installed on all servers without issue.

Exchange 2010 NLB and remote Subnets

While configuring an Exchange 2010 NLB I had no choice but to publish direct access to the Exchange servers from the Internet instead of using my preferred method of directing all traffic through a TMG\ISA server.

Consequently access to the published NLB wouldn’t resolve properly from external locations. All traffic on the local LAN was fine although traffic originating from outside the local subnet was dropped and no response was received by clients.

The servers were configured with dual NIC’s with a dedicated NIC on each host being assigned for NLB traffic. As the NLB NIC only has an IP and Subnet entered I suspected that the lack of default gateway to be the issue.

I changed the Firewall rules to point to an individual servers Public NIC then everything was fine although this bypassed the NLB and as such wasnt really of much use to me.

As of Windows 2008 R2 all networking uses “Strong Host Model” whereby traffic can only exit from the interface that it entered on.

A resolution for this was to allow forwarding of traffic from the NLB NIC to the public NIC via the following command.

netsh int ipv4 set int “[Name of NLB NIC]” forwarding=enabled

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