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 Home > FAQs, Tips & Tricks > Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server for Demon Internet |
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Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server for Demon Internet
While I have continued to publish the document below, I'd like to point out that I no longer use Demon Internet as my ISP either at work or home. This is due to the ever-increasing level of incompetence they demonstrated, the insane amounts of 'red tape' they imposed on their commercial customers and their pathetic support. Personally, I could no longer recommend them.  I
recently moved all our business connectivity over to a U.K. ISP
called REDNET 
REDNET offer an excellent all-round package and well-informed, helpful & friendly sales and support staff. Their connectivity is reliable, fast & affordable. Contact sales@red.net. NOTE: This FAQ assumes you are using Exchange Server v5.5. Exchange 5.0 is basically the same, although some of the prompts and tab names are slightly different.
Before you begin Before configuring Exchange, check the following:
Adding and configuring an Internet Mail Service (IMS) The first thing you need to do is add an IMS in the Exchange Administrator. If you already have any listed in the Connections node (Ctrl-Shift-N), delete them. Add a new connector using File | New Other | Internet Mail Service. This will ask the most obvious questions, and create you a 'boiler-plate' connection. Once this is done, go into the Properties for the IMS and check the following in each of the tabs:
Understanding how mail is transfered between Demon and your Exchange Server NOTE: This section assumes the NT/Exchange server have a modem/ISDN TA attached that will dial Demon. See the Router section below if this is not the case. Demon have historically always used Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver mail to their customers. Most other ISPs use POP3. With POP3, you configure your mail software to 'go and retrieve' your mail from a server at your ISP. What SMTP does is effectivelly 'deliver' the mail to you when you connect. What happens is this: Whan people send you mail (to '{any_user_name@nodename.demon.co.uk}') the mail is stored on the Demon post (aka punt) machines. At the time of writing, there are two punt machines. When you dial your Demon account, your modem will connect to one of the many modems at Demon and your machine will log in to the Demon network (using the nodename and password). At this point, your modem/RAS/Dial-Up Networking connection will 'aquire' the IP address allocated to you by Demon when you set up the account. This is another 'quirk' of the Demon account that you often don't see with other ISPs; 'fixed IP addresses'. You always get the same IP address when you connect. Most other ISPs will 'dynamically' allocate you an IP each time you connect. So, when you connect and login, the Demon punt machines will attempt to connect (using SMTP) to your IP address. If the connection is successful, the punt machines will 'send' the mail to you. This is where Exchange Server comes in; the IMS part of Exchange opens an SMTP port and waits for incoming connections. When an SMTP connection is established from Demon to IMS, all mail is streamed down that connection to Exchange. Exchange then examines each mail item for the recipient, finds the appropriate Exchange user for that recipient (see Users below) and places the mail item in their Inbox. If no Exchange user can be found with the appropriate email address, the mail item is 'bounced' back to the sender and a 'Non-delivery notification' is posted to the Administrator user as specified in the Internet Mail tab of the IMS (see above). In the opposite direction (i.e. delivering outgoing messages), Exchange will hold on to any mail sent from the users until a connection to Demon is established, then send all outgoing mail (again, using SMTP) to the Demon post machine, which then routes it on to the final desination. In IMS, we tell it to dial Demon every hour so that the punt machines see a connection and deliver any waiting mail. Of course, there might not be any. The timeout settings for IMC (and, I think, more importantly, the Demon RAS connection) determine how long the connection waits before disconnecting. Generally, the punt machines will deliver your mail to you almost immediatelly. Once they've stopped, the line should become idle, timeout and hang up. Obviously, it's worth monitoring that this happens otherwise you'll end up with a vast phone bill... Creating and configuring Users When a user is created in Exchange, that user can have multiple e-mail addresses. Each user must have at least an X400 address, because this is the internal Exchange protocol used to uniquely identify a user to Exchange. The user can also have SMTP, CCMAIL and Microsoft Mail addresses. For Demon, SMTP is important. Exchange will automatically generate e-mail addresses for users as they're created. To specify which type of addresses should be created and what format they should take, check the "Site Addressing" settings withing the Configuration node for your server in Exchange Administrator. Exchange will generate addresses using the SMTP preferences specified here and the naming preferences in Tools | Options | Auto Naming. The SMTP default should be your Demon nodename, i.e. '@nodename.demon.co.uk' or your mail forwarding account (ours is '@southdown.co.uk'). If you've already created users and this was set to something incorrect, you'll need to amend each existing user manually. Each time you create a user, a default SMTP e-mail address will be created using the above 'rules'. For example, I have configured our Exchange Server to do the first letter of first name + surname @ southdown.co.uk. When I created myself (Jon Grieve), it automatically generated a user with the e-mail address jgrieve@southdown.co.uk. This can save a lot of time. How can I test that Exchange is working correctly before I make my first dial? To test that Exchange is configured and ready to roll, try the following: (WARNING: This is not pretty!)
How can I see what Demon/Exchange are doing when connected? Apart from some flashing on your modem (assuming it's external) there aren't many clues as to whether Demon and Exchange are doing anything. Of course, the magical moment when a mail message arrives in your Inbox proves something is happening. To see what is happening, load Performance Monitor (Start | Programs | Administrative Tools) and add the following counters from the "MSExchangeIMC" object: What if I use a Dial-on-demand Router attached to my LAN? In this type of configuration (I believe Demon call this package something like Network Dial?), generally the router will be the device that aquires the IP address allocated to you by Demon. So, when it connects, the Post/Punt machines at Demon will attempt to connect to the router on the SMTP port (25) to deliver the mail. Of course, the router is not a mail server and has not opened this port ready to receive the mail so the delivery from Demon fails (and their servers continue to simply 'sit on' the messages) and re-deliver it each time you connect. What you need to do it tell the router to 'pipe' any incoming SMTP/Port 25 connections over to the Exchange server 'behind' it on your LAN. The actual configuration for doing this will differ between makes and models of routers, so it's not possible to provide a step-by-step guide in this FAQ. For details on configuring the router, consult it's documentation. Another likely way of configuring the router is by Telnet-ing into it. Load TELNET.EXE on your Windows workstation and attempt to connect to the IP address of the router. Alternatively, try connecting to the IP address of the router using your Web browser; it may have a mini Web server built in for configuring it... If anyone has instructions for specific makes & models, mail them to me (please clearly identify the router you're providing instructions for) and I'll try and list as many as possible on this page. |
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