“Limited External Calling” through OCS 2007 R2 Edge Server after renewing certificates

As indicated in some of my earlier posts such as this one:

OCS 2007 R2: “Some calls to and from people outside of your corporate network may not connect due to server connectivity problems… ” message is intermittently displayed to MOC users but calls continue to work

http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2010/09/some-calls-to-and-from-people-outside.html

Errors experienced with our MOC clients indicating that we have:

1. Limited External Calling
2. “Some calls to and from people outside of your corporate network may not connect due to server connectivity problems… ”

… can be caused by many different reasons and the following is yet another one of these examples.

Problem

You’ve recently renewed your OCS 2007 R2 certificates for all of your servers and external users who are Enterprise Voice enabled begin to see the following:

Limited External Calling

Clicking on the notification states the following:

“Some calls to and from people outside of your corporate network may not connect due to server connectivity problems… ”

Running validation on your front-end server throws the following warnings and errors:

TCP connect failed: x.x.x.x:5062 Error Code: 0x274d No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it x.x.x.x:5062

A/V Authentication Edge Server: Could not contact A/V Authentication Edge Server.

To resolve this error, check for the following

1. The outbound proxy is reachable.
2. The outbound proxy and A/V Authentication Edge Server are in trusted server list of each other.
3. The outbound proxy and A/V Authentication Edge Server have valid certificates.
4. Conference Server certificate is valid.
5. A/V Authentication Edge Server Gruu is correct.

Solution

The solution’s will vary depending on what was done during the process of renewing the certificates but in our case, the services weren’t restarted after the new certificates were applied so all that was needed to be done was to restart the services.

Note: This can also be caused if your Edge services were stopped and you’ve in or VPN-ed into the corporate network:

Installing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a SQL Server install and since I had to do so this week, I thought I’d take this opportunity to do a few screenshots to show what the install looks like. Note that I didn’t add a whole lot of content as to why certain items were selected as this post serves to show what the wizard looks like and not to dig deep into why the parameters and service accounts were set the way it is.

The following are the details for the two servers:

Server: SQL03

• Database Engine Services
• Analysis Services
• Business Intelligence Development
• Client Tools Connectivity
• Integration Services
• Client Tools Backwards Compatibility
• Client Tools SDK
• SQL Server Books Online
• Management Tools
• SQL Client Connectivity

Server: Report

• Analysis Services
• Reporting Services
• Management Tools

Installing SQL03 – SQL Engine, Analysis Services, Integration Services

Start the installation by running setup.

The following window lists the fields for you to enter the service accounts. I won’t go too deep into the best practices but you should be using domain accounts with locked down permissions. Also note that the accounts will get checked by the install so if you enter the incorrect password or forget to user domain\ for the account name, you’ll get an error message preventing you to proceed forward.

Here’s an example of the error message after I forgot to precede the login name with the domain:

Add the accounts you want to be allowed for administration of SQL:

The following screenshot shows how I’ve changed the location of the database and log files:

The following shows the start of the analysis services configuration:

… and we’re done. The install is pretty straight forward and I noticed that the groups SQL Server 2008 R1 asked for is no longer required.

Installing Report – Analysis Services, Reporting Services

As with the first install, launch setup:

I’m going to leave the configuration at a later time.

… and we’re done.