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Correcting Problems Accessing Your Public Folder Heirarchy in Exchange System Manager

One of the problems that I had put on my back burner was correcting a problem I had every time I used Exchange System Manager (ESM) to look at the Public Folders on our Exchange Server.  I would navigate to the Folders node beneath my Organization, as shown below. 

When I would do so, I would get a rather nasty error stating the following:

The SSL certificate server name is incorrect. 
ID No. c103b404

A quick bit of Googling on this error turned up MS Knowledgebase article 324345.  The fix suggested there mentioned the need to disable the use of secure communications to the Exadmin virtual directory in Internet Services Manager.  Unfortunately, this solution did not work since that was not the problem in my case. 

I returned to Google, and I saw someone mention in a forum the need to use ADSIEdit to remove the attribute.  Of course, the poster in this forum did not specify what attribute they had to edit.  So, on a lark I performed this search, and I came across this page in German.  Given my lack of knowledge of the German language, I opted for the translated page

According to the rough translation, I had to edit the msExchSecureBindings attribute.  Now that I had the attribute I had to edit, I wanted to find some official guidance on what this attribute did and what I had to do to correct the problem.  Thankfully, this piece on Technet was able to explain to me what I needed to do.  Once I followed those steps and restarted IIS, I was able to access my Public Folders from within ESM. 

After this was all said and done, I found an even better link to fix this problem at Jim McBee’s Mostly Exchange Web Log, specifically in the post entitled E2K3 Public folder management - SSL certificate server name is incorrect error.  Below are the steps I followed and the ones included in Jim’s post (with a bit more explanation). 

  1. Click Start, then click Run. Type ADSIEDIT.msc in the Open field, and click on OK.
  2. Within ADSIEdit, navigate to the following object: CN=Configuration, then CN=Services, CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=<Your Organization>, CN=Administrative Groups, CN=First Administrative Group, CN=Servers, CN=<Your Server Name>, CN=Protocols, CN=HTTP, CN=1, CN=Exadmin. 
  3. Right-click CN=Exadmin, and select Properties to display the properties of the CN=Exadmin object. 
  4. Scroll down in the CN=Exadmin Properties window and locate the msExchSecureBindings attribute. Select it and click the Edit button. 
  5. The Multi-valued String Editor should open. If it has a value of :443:, select that value in the Values list. Click Remove.
  6. Click OK to close the String Editor window. Click OK again to close the CN=Exadmin Properties window.
  7. Close ADSIEDIT, and open Exchange System Manager. You should now be able to see your Public Folders.

You have now successfully hacked an Active Directory attribute to fix a problem.  Pat yourself on the back! 

{ 4 } Comments

  1. mokiejovis | November 30, 2006 at 7:35 am EST | Permalink

    And now, when some other poor bastard with the same rare problem goes googling, he’ll find this page. Good on you!

  2. mokiejovis | November 30, 2006 at 8:35 am EST | Permalink

    And now, when some other poor bastard with the same rare problem goes googling, he’ll find this page. Good on you!

  3. r4lph | July 23, 2008 at 1:36 am EDT | Permalink

    didn’t work for me - I’ve still got the same error. The SSL certificate server name is incorrect. Tried turning off SSL in the Exadmin site and hacking the Active Directory as you (and several others on the net) describe. the error has still got me.

  4. r4lph | July 23, 2008 at 1:36 am EDT | Permalink

    didn’t work for me - I’ve still got the same error. The SSL certificate server name is incorrect. Tried turning off SSL in the Exadmin site and hacking the Active Directory as you (and several others on the net) describe. the error has still got me.

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