Re: Exchange Security and Administration: Small/Tiny Site
- From: "Michael Dragone" <no.e-mail=less_spam>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:22:18 -0400
Setting up Outlook Anywhere (which is the "HTTP connector" you mentioned) isn't very difficult. Like any Web service, you'll want to ensure that you secure it with SSL. You cannot use Apache to handle this traffic. Outlook Anywhere traffic is handled by the RPC over HTTPS Proxy service of Windows Server. IIS is also required.
As for security, Exchange is very secure out of the box and is not hard to maintain from a security standpoint. Since you're already diligent with updating your Windows boxes you should be in good shape. Microsoft offers a tool called the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer that can scan your Exchange servers and identify many configuration and security issues and issues that don't conform to the recommended best practices.
"Mark Olbert" <ChairmanMAO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ts87649o128bsucdnj8rsarkjbg6t98edi@xxxxxxxxxx
I've been using Exchange for the last seven years to maintain calendars, contacts, etc. on my home LAN. However, I've never used it
to handle email, out of a fear that it was not "inherently" secure enough to expose it to the wilds of the internet without more
sysadmin experience than I have. Instead, I handle my email with postfix on a linux box, and restrict external access to the pop3
server to secure stunnel connections. On the Windows side, I currently run Exchange 2003 on a Server 2003 platform behind the
firewall.
I recently ordered the installation of the same environment for the startup company I work at, however, and was pretty impressed by
the ability of Exchange 2003 to interact with Outlook over http. This has caused me to want to rethink my "don't expose Exchange"
decision.
How hard is it to keep Exchange secure, in practice? I am diligent about applying patches and security fixes to all my Windows
software, and I don't mind investing time hardening systems. But I don't want to have to be in the trenches administering security
for Exchange on a weekly basis. Are there security risks related to Exchange's http connector? Advice, perspective and pointers to
resources would be appreciated.
On a more technical note, is setting up Exchange to use the http connector difficult? Does it require that all http traffic be
handled by the Windows Server Exchange is running on? Right now I run Apache httpd on my linux firewall/router to serve webpages,
and I'd like to continue doing that.
- Mark
.
- References:
- Exchange Security and Administration: Small/Tiny Site
- From: Mark Olbert
- Exchange Security and Administration: Small/Tiny Site
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