Step-by-Step Guide to Deploying Windows Mobile-based Devices with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 sp2

Path Troubleshooting Direct Push

 If your users have problems with short battery life, the heartbeat interval may be too short. Contact your mobile operator to have the device heartbeat interval modified.

 If your users' devices are unsynchronized for long periods of time, this may be a result of having the Exchange server session duration shorter than the maximum heartbeat interval. Check with your mobile operator.

 Another possible cause of unsynchronized devices has to do with the firewall settings. The firewall session timeout should be equal to or greater than the idle timeout on your mobile operator's network or the firewall will close the session prematurely.

Using a heartbeat interval of 30 minutes has positive implications for battery life and bandwidth consumption. When direct push sessions are permitted to live longer (such as 30 minutes), there are fewer HTTP round trips, less data sent and received, and less power consumed by the device.

In other infrastructure scenarios, idle session time out settings may also include any other packet-forwarding networking devices or web appliances between the Exchange 2003 Server and mobile device. To modify the idle session timeout settings for your third party firewall or reverse proxy device, please refer to the hardware manufacturer’s documentation to do so. Additionally, Microsoft has worked with mobile operators to increase the idle connection timeouts on their outgoing firewalls, but the enterprises that are deploying direct push technology will also need to increase those timeouts on their incoming firewalls per the instructions above. In Microsoft’s own deployment, the timeouts on the firewall are set to thirty minutes.

Verify Direct Push Initialization

1. Verify that Exchange ActiveSync is loaded and IP-based AUTD is initialized by checking the application log on the FE for events below. Exchange Activesync gets initialized on the first sync attempt.

Event Source: Server ActiveSync

Event Category: None

Event ID: 3002

Date: 3/19/2006

Time: 12:44:08 PM

User: N/A

Computer: 1B25A

Description:

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync has been loaded: Process ID: [3048].

Event Type: Information

Event Source: Server ActiveSync

Event Category: None

Event ID: 3025

Date: 3/19/2006

Time: 12:44:19 PM

User: N/A

Computer: 1B25A

Description:

IP-based AUTD has been initialized.

2. Verify that the FE is listening on port 2883.

3. To check if the server is listening on the AUTD port, you can run "netstat -ano". Here are results before and after IP-based AUTD has initialized.

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State PID

UDP 0.0.0.0:1985 *:* 1928

UDP 0.0.0.0:3456 *:* 3356

After

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State PID

UDP 0.0.0.0:2883 *:* 3048

UDP 0.0.0.0:3456 *:* 3356

Netstat provides the Process ID which matches the EAS process per the initialization event in the application log.

Another way to check if the server is listening on the AUTD port is to use PortQry (available on Microsoft.com). The following lists the process that is listening on the port:

Process ID: 3048 (w3wp.exe)

PID Port Local IP State Remote IP:Port

3048 TCP 31479 172.29.8.222 ESTABLISHED 172.29.9.107:3268

3048 TCP 31480 172.29.8.222 ESTABLISHED 172.29.9.107:389

3048 UDP 2883 0.0.0.0 *:*

Troubleshooting Direct Push Using Logs

1. To enable device logging, go to ActiveSync, Menu, Configure Server, Next, Advanced and turn up Event logging to Verbose. The logs will be saved in the Windows\ActiveSync folder. PING commands will be logged in "Ping Exchange Server x.txt" where x =1,2,3. You should see commands similar to the one that follows:

POST Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync?User=administrator&DeviceId=6F24CAD599A5BF1A690246B8C68FAE8D&DeviceType=PocketPC&Cmd=Ping

MS-ASProtocolVersion: 2.5

The POST command is also logged in the IIS log on the FE.

The Ctrl log on the device can also be used to troubleshoot direct push technology although the format of this file may change with device updates.

1. Check the IIS logs on the BE to see if AUTDState.XML is being created or updated. You should see an entry something similar to the one that follows:

PUT /exchange/Administrator@1b1domain.lab/NON_IPM_SUBTREE/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync/PocketPC/6F24CAD599A5BF1A690246B8C68FAE8D/AutdState.xml

Note:

The AUTDState.XML is created on receipt of the 1st PING request and is updated only when the heartbeat or folder list changes. So you may not see this command for every Ping request.

AUTD state information is maintained on the mailbox server in the NON_IPM_SUBTREE of each user's mailbox. 

In Internet Explorer, you can Choose File, Open, check the box to "Open as Web Folder" and type the following:

http://server/exchange/user/NON_IPM_SUBTREE/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync/Autd-State.XML

The following is a sample AUTDState.XML file.

1.0

680





7529a5b36290aa458b9e1fc2d5ff85a6-3aaa2

Email





7529a5b36290aa458b9e1fc2d5ff85a6-2cfb8

Calendar

UDP: Src Port: Unknown (33660); Dst Port: Unknown (2883); Length = 162 (0xA2) UDP: Source Port = 0x837C UDP: Destination Port = 0x0B43 UDP: Total length = 162 (0xA2) UDP: UDP Checksum = 0xC233 UDP: Data: Number of data bytes remaining = 154 (0x009A) 00000: 00 0E 0C 06 CA C0 00 D0 B7 24 86 2B 08 00 45 00 ....ÊÀ.Е$† ..E. 00010: 00 B6 C8 73 00 00 80 11 07 3A AC 1D 09 71 AC 1D .¶Ès..€..:¬..q¬. 00020: 08 DE 83 7C 0B 43 00 A2 C2 33 4E 4F 54 49 46 59 .Þƒ|.C.¢Â3NOTIFY 00030: 20 68 74 74 70 75 3A 2F 2F 31 62 32 35 61 2E 31 httpu://1b25a.1 00040: 62 31 64 6F 6D 61 69 6E 2E 6C 61 62 3A 32 38 38 b1domain.lab:288 00050: 33 2F 33 35 33 39 35 63 65 34 2D 31 35 30 34 2D 3/35395ce4-1504- 00060: 34 61 63 34 2D 39 37 32 31 2D 66 31 35 32 63 36 4ac4-9721-f152c6 00070: 34 36 65 61 33 35 20 48 54 54 50 2F 31 2E 31 0D 46ea35 HTTP/1.1. 00080: 0A 53 75 62 73 63 72 69 62 65 2D 67 72 6F 75 70 .Subscribe-group 00090: 3A 20 55 73 50 43 57 77 46 4C 32 30 71 37 44 2B : UsPCWwFL20q7D 000A0: 6E 61 76 6F 4D 71 79 41 3D 3D 0D 0A 53 75 62 73 navoMqyA==..Subs 000B0: 63 72 69 70 74 69 6F 6E 2D 69 64 3A 20 32 37 0D cription-id: 27. 000C0: 0A 0D 0A 00

Push Mail and GAL Lookup missing when syncing to Exchange 2003 SP2 with a MSFP Device.

The following is a reprint of a blog on Microsoft TechNet that explains steps that an administrator can take to help isolate issues around direct push email and GAL Lookup when synching to Exchange 2003. For additional information and the full context of this article, please see the following TechNet blog: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108981.

During deployments you may run into the issue where your server is up and you are syncing without a problem but you aren’t getting the option to sync as items arrive as well as the option to do Lookup Online is missing. This is normally caused by a firewall issue where the Options verb is being blocked.

We see we are not returning the expected response for the OPTIONS command from the following entry on the device logs. Enable Verbose logging on the device from server settings in Advanced in device to see these logs.

=-= Build 14847 =-= =-= No XIP Information Available =-= Mail.company.com =-=- [12/10/2006 2:28:59.0] -=-= =-=-=-= Client Request =-=-=-= OPTIONS Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync?User=dptest&DeviceId=6F24CAD599A5BF1A690246B8C68FAE8D&DeviceType=PocketPC Accept-Language: en-us X-MS-PolicyKey: 0 -=-=-=- Start of Body -=-=-=- =-=- [12/10/2006 2:29:4.0] -=-= =-=-=-= Server Response =-=-=- HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error ( The system cannot find the file specified. ) Connection: close Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 2014

The HTTP 500 is the response from the server for the OPTIONS command sent by the device.

We normally get this response if URLScan is blocking the verb. So we have to check for URLScan in the server. If URLScan is present, then we can add OPTIONS to the AllowVerb section of URLScan.ini file.

The above symptom is confirmed from the IIS logs as well.

2006-10-10 04:01:13 W3SVC1 SCIDUBMSG01 10.251.99.165 POST /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync User=username&DeviceId=02563C023942F3E168000050BF1977E0&DeviceType=PocketPC& Cmd=Sync&Log=V1TCaSSC:0A0C0D0FS:0A0C0D0SP:1C3I3040S122000R0S0L0H0P 443 consoto\username 209.95.228.19 HTTP/1.0 Microsoft-PocketPC/3.0 - - mail.company.com 200 0 0 326 516 249

Notice the entry Log=V1 in the above log entry.

It indicates that Airsync protocol version 1.0 is being used, whereas with Push functionality Airsync version 2.5 is the latest and to be used.

Ideally we should use Airsync protocol version 2.5 which will be represented as Log=V4.

So permitting the OPTIONS verb in URLScan or whatever software is blocking it should resolve the issue.

Sample Server response=-=- [16/9/2006 1:15:23.0] -=-= =-=-=-= Server Response =-=-=- HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:45:21 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Pragma: no-cache Content-Length: 0 Public: OPTIONS, POST Allow: OPTIONS, POST MS-Server-ActiveSync: 6.5.7638.1 MS-ASProtocolVersions: 1.0,2.0,2.1,2.5 MS-ASProtocolCommands: Sync,SendMail,SmartForward,SmartReply,GetAttachment,GetHierarchy, CreateCollection,DeleteCollection,MoveCollection,FolderSync,FolderCreate, FolderDelete,FolderUpdate,MoveItems,GetItemEstimate,MeetingResponse, ResolveRecipients,ValidateCert,Provision,Search,Notify,Ping

Based on the list of commands returned by the server as above, the device will decide which version of AirSync protocol to use. Different features like direct push technology or AUTD etc depend on the version of the protocol being used for communication.

Check for URLScan on your Exchange server and check if any other device or software device is blocking OPTIONS command.

URLScan is an add-on tool that can be used by Web site administrators. The administrators can control the actions of URLScan and can restrict the type of HTTP requests that the server processes. URLscan.ini file is the configuration file of this tool and URLscan tool will not function after we rename this file and once we rename it back it will start working again, nothing else will be affected.

For more information see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article, "Using URLScan on IIS" (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307608/). The purpose of this article is to ensure effective distribution of the Internet Information Services (IIS) security tool URLScan.

After you edit your URLSCAN.ini file a Server reboot is not required just restart the IIS & WWW services.

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