I removed the Edge Subscription and now I cannot renew it. Edge Transport 2013

Question

My environment consist of one Exchange 2013 mailbox server and one 2013 Edge Transport server. Both are running on a Windows 2012 R2 VM. The issue started when I renewed an expired self-signed cert on the Exchange server to troubleshoot an OWA and ECP access. I believe that may have broken the Edge sync connection between the two machines. After reading a few articles, they recommended I re-subscribe the Edge Subscription and by doing so, I followed the instructions and ran the remove-edgesubscription on both the Exchange and Edge box. Now, after creating the new xml file, when I go on the Exchange box to try and run the new subscription, it goes through, but when I run Start-EdgeSyncronization, it still states Results: CouldNotConnect. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi @Paul Siso

If you run the following command in EMS on edge server, would you see an expired certificate?

    Get-ExchangeCertificate | fl  

If it shows the certificate has expired, please follow these steps to recreate the edge subscription:
1.run the new-exchangecertificate command to create a new certificate and assign it to SMTP service on edge server

2.run the following command on edge server to generate the edge subscription file

New-EdgeSubscription -FileName "C:\Data\EdgeSubscriptionInfo.xml"  

3.copy the file to mailbox server and run the following command on mailbox server to import the edge subscription file

New-EdgeSubscription -FileData ([byte[]]$(Get-Content -Path "C:\Data\EdgeSubscriptionInfo.xml" -Encoding Byte -ReadCount 0)) -Site "Default-First-Site-Name"  

If you didn't see any error message, the edge subscription would have been recreated successfully.

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Answer 2

I had faced the similar issue. the simple solution which worked for me was to reboot the Edge Transport Server which allowed me to create a new Edge Subscription File.

Please Note: if you have an Extranal CA issues certificate, make sure the SMTP service has been enabled for Edge Transport Self Signed Certificate, otherwise if you would generate the Edge Subscription and try to run the command on your mailbox Servers for Edge Subscription, you will receive the following Error: The subscription file failed to load for the following reason: The direct trust certificate of the subscribed Edge Transport server with thumbprint <Thumprint> is a duplicate of the certificate of one of the HubTransport servers. Sharing the same certificate between Edge and Hub Transport servers is not allowed.

so Simple Answer is, Reboot the Server and make sure SMTP service is assigned to the SelfSigned Certificate of the Edge Server. Once you have generated the Edge Subscription file, feel free to assign the SMTP Service to the 3rd party issued CA Certificate.

Hope it Helps.