RE: RPC over 80

["Sarbjit Singh Gill" <ssgill () gilltechnologies com>]

Hi Corey,

Advantages - loads of them. Having you entire mailbox cache sync-ed with
your exchange server while you are not in the office is great. And the
access to exchange does not required an initial connection to the VPN. It is
like fire-up outlook and it just works. If you trust your SSL to do your
online banking and shopping, you would trust it on RPC-HTTP(s) too.

Disadvantage - The setup can get quite complex. Get and ISA(has wizards to
help you and it does the bridging of HTTPS connections), you need exchange
2003 servers,you need at least one DC to be Windows 2003 GC and one to be
the RPC-Http proxy.  and a FE/BE Exchange 2003 Setup and oh ya, SP1 for
Exchange 2003. With SP1 the setup is easier.

Known problems --- not that I know of. 

Resources: msexchange.org and isaserver.org

/Gill



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Corey Watts-Jones [mailto:cwattsjones () rogers com] 
> Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:50 PM
> To: security-basics () securityfocus com
> Subject: RPC over 80
>
> G'day list,
>
> Just to grab some opinions from the list, we're trying to cut 
> our usage of VPNs down for a lot of our clients as password 
> management seems to be an issue for a lot of our users 
> (shocker, eh?). So, a suggested alternative for users that 
> just need access to their Exchange accounts has been RPC over 
> 80, to allow them to use their full outlook clients instead of OWA.
>
> Any advantages, disadvantages or known problems with this?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Corey Watts-Jones
> BIT Incorp. 
> Network Technician