11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

502_3 bad gateway IIS AAR RP for Lync

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I encountered a "new" error message this week, as I was finalizing a Lync 2013 deployment for a customer. When I say new, it was new to me, as I had not seen this before. Everything was set up for remote access and federations, but certain features, such as mobility did not work right away. I decided to test the URL's from the outside, and was surprised to find the following error message:


This deployment was set up with a IIS ARR for reverse proxy. I searched for the 502 (502.3 to be exact) on forums and internet in general, but could not find any answer to my exact issue.

I verified firewall ports and connectivity was ok. I also checked the web sites on port 4443 and 8080 from a client inside, and saw no apparent errors.

I went through the deployment guide one more time (step by step), and discovered I had forgotten to import the internal CA ROOT to the Reverse Proxy machine. Once this was installed, it all worked just fine.

The reason I decided to write this post, is because the root cause was not very obvious to me (only after reading tracing logs and checking the step by step guide again, was I able to figure out the problem). And I wanted to write a reminder to myself, and maybe help somebody else if they happened to forget to import the ROOT CA.

The 502 "invalid response" can be a lot of things. Certificate error being one of them. Now I know.

For those looking for a guide to set this up, I have two links for you:
This is the one I used: http://uclobby.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/configuring-arr-for-lync-server/

And here is one from nexthop: http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2013/02/19/using-iis-arr-as-a-reverse-proxy-for-lync-server-2013.aspx

I preferred the first one, as it was a more "general" rule to catch all. But it might not suit all scenarios. The one from nexthop is much more detailed, and will have you set up a rule for each URL.