421 and 451 Exchange 2007 Errors

Our company was having issues sending emails to certain domains. Everything was fine except for a few of these problematic domains. These emails were just sitting in my Exchange edge server's outbound queue...

The error message I was getting in the Exchange 2007 queue was this:

"451 4.4.0 Primary target IP address responded with: "421 4.4.2 Connection dropped." Attempted failover to alternate host, but that did not succeed. Either there are no alternate hosts, or delivery failed to all alternates."

After troubleshooting the issue for a while, I determined that my email server and the problematic domains were not talking nicely with EHELO. The resolution was to created a send connector that forced HELO for the problematic domains. From the exchange management shell, run the following to create the special send connector:

New-SendConnector -Name ForceHelo -AddressSpaces problemdomain.com -ForceHELO $true

After you create this connector, you can always add other problematic domains to the connector which will force HELO.

Max Upload Size Limit on SharePoint

I recently had a SharePoint issue that required a call to Microsoft PSS. We are running MOSS 2007 SP1 on a Windows 2008 Server. Problem was, we were unable to upload files larger than 28 MB to a document library, regardless of file type. I followed all of the steps posted in this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/27/file-name-length-size-and-invalid-character-restrictions-and-recommendations.aspx

However, we were still not able to upload large files.

I called Microsoft and they confirmed that the the steps listed in the link above should be all we need, but there are cases where another minor change in the site's web.config file is necessary. Go to your site in IIS and explore to it (right click -> explore in IIS 7.0). Find the web.config file and make these changes at the bottom. Sorry for the image but blogger.com doesn't like these characters and I'm not going to escape them all out!

I did not have to reboot the server or even cycle IIS, it worked the next time I tried to upload a file. Apparently Sharepoint was configured correctly but IIS still would not recognize the new settings so we had to change it manually.