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Exchange 2000 FE/ BE configuration

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by heylarry

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I'm trying to configure a W2K Exchange Server frontend/backend configuration with a DMZ. I have a Watchguard SOHO firewall and also a Smoothwall firewall to work with. I have succesfully logged on with OWA client through the Frontend without any firewalls so I believe that its all in the firewall configuration now. The T1 router maps a public IP to the external side of the SOHO "192.168.2.X". The SOHO then creates the NAT to the internal network IP scheme "192.168.1.x".
The question is how to config the F/E behind the SOHO in a DMZ and the B/E behind the smoothwall.
Authentication,DNS,IP Schemes,and Microsoft have me buggin!!!!

Has anyone done this or a similar config.?

Thanks.

1 reply

by kozmo

Well there is alot of thought and discussion about this and what you should or shouldn't do. My recommendation, based upon what you stated above would be to have both the FE and BE on your internal network and to open up the https on your firewall to the FE server along with the smtp traffic going to it. you would have to configure SSL and get a certificate. you can manually create a certificate but than your users would get a message each time that it was an unsigned cert.

This way they are only hitting the FE so it is accomplishing what you want. Putting it into the DMZ opens up way to many ports to pass the traffic back and forth. Believe me i tried that step first and the amount of ports needing to be opened was way to many. I even had a firewall expert on hand to assist me with the ports and he also got concerned about the number of ports.

I just got done going from a migration from 5.5 to 2000 than setting up a FE BE setup for OWA. rather than use http we are using https "ssl" to secure our passwords, otherwise the passwords are going through in cleartext.

I hope this helps.

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