Yesterday I saw an issue where the Exchange Management Shell wouldn’t connect so thought I’d replicate it in my lab and let you know how to fix it. The error is below:
New-PSSession : [litex01.litwareinc.com] Connecting to remote server litex01.litwareinc.com failed with the following error message : [ClientAccessServer=LITEX01,BackEndServer=litex01.litwareinc.com,RequestId=357032aa-2312-477e-be88-8d99 db9027c5,TimeStamp=18/11/2015 00:40:28] [FailureCategory=Cafe-SendFailure] For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
After looking through the event logs, I came across this event which provides a bit more information:
Event ID: 15021
An error occurred while using SSL configuration for endpoint 0.0.0.0:444. The error status code is contained within the returned data.
As I can’t get into the Exchange Management Shell to check the Exchange certificate assignment, I moved on to check IIS. Both the Default Web Site and the Exchange Back End website need to have this certificate assigned. In IIS, you can’t have both sites listening on port 443 without a hostname configured so Microsoft have got around this so that when Exchange is installed, the Exchange Back End web site actually has a binding of port 444 for HTTPS which matches the event above. So, we’ll go ahead and check that this web site has the correct certificate configured in the bindings.
To check this, first open up IIS Manager:
Then right click on the Exchange Back End and click on Bindings:
Double click on https and ensure that there is a certificate selected:
As you can see, there’s no certificate selected. Go ahead and select the correct certificate:
Once done, click on OK then click Close. Close and reopen the Exchange Management Shell and now things look much better:
Outlook and OWA should now start to work also. All the best!