Posted on January 15th, 2012%
Anyone who has attempted to configure Dynamics CRM 2011 with an Internet-Facing Deployment (IFD) knows that it is no trivial task. Where there are blog posts that discuss setting up an IFD, and Microsoft documentation for configuring the IFD, they often assume that ADFS and Dynamics CRM are installed on the same server, and that there is only one Dynamics CRM front-end server. Unfortunately, real-world implementations don’t always follow that.
For example, take the following configuration:
- a Dynamics CRM front-end server on the internal network, providing services to internal clients
- a Dynamics CRM front-end server in an Internet-facing zone, providing services to external clients
- a separate ADFS server accessible to internal and external clients
Dynamics CRM with IFD requires a combination of ADFS relaying party trusts and DNS configuration to get things working. One caveat with IFDs is that the internal and external host names for the Dynamics CRM front-end servers must be different because, externally, the host name includes the CRM organization name. Where, internally, you may have https://icrm.contoso.com/crm, externally you would have https://crm.contoso.com.
Let’s flesh out our sample implementation and requirements:
- icrm.contoso.com is our internal Dynamics CRM front-end server, accessible only on the internal network
- ecrm.contoso.com is our external Dynamics CRM front-end server, accessible to our internal network and the public Internet
- adfs.contoso.com is our ADFS server, accessible to our internal network and the public Internet
- We have two Dynamics CRM organizations: CRM and CRM-Test.
- We want our internal and external (public Internet) clients to access CRM using the same URLs: crm.contoso.com and crm-test.contoso.com. In other words, we don’t want the two-URL problem outlined above.
The last bit has nothing to do with Dynamics CRM: it is all done in IIS. Let me explain how. . . . → Read More: URL Rewriting for user-friendly URLs with Dynamics CRM 2011
Posted on November 4th, 2011%
In a recent deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, users were accessing the application via the server’s host name, e.g. https://crmserver01.company.com. That is rather unfriendly, so we created a new DNS record for crm.company.com — giving users the easier-to-remember https://crm.company.com (and removing a dependency on a server name).
Unfortunately, authenticating to https://crm.company.com didn’t work for Internet Explorer users. IE would prompt for the credentials, but they were never accepted. Authentication did work for other browsers, and all browsers — including IE — were able to authenticate to https://crmserver01.company.com without issue.
This didn’t make sense. The domain name of the server shouldn’t matter (both were in IE’s Local Intranet Zone), nor should the browser version. But the different experience between browsers was all I had to go on, so I did some (network) sniffing.
Using Fiddler2 to monitor the network traffic created by web browsers, I opened Firefox and connected to http://crm.company.com (no SSL, so it’s easier to monitor network traffic). Firefox . . .
→ Read More: Troubleshooting Windows Authentication in IIS
Posted on September 2nd, 2010%
After upgrading the CSFBL forums to vBulletin 4.0, I noticed that performance was slightly worse than in the previous version. A little searching revealed that vBulletin supports memcached (an in-memory distributed caching system). Since I’ve got RAM to spare, I figured this is worth a shot.
Unfortunately, getting memcached running on the server (Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit) took a few tricks, and getting memached running through IIS/PHP was another. To help other people through the same process (and to remind myself in the future), I’ll share the installation and configuration steps that worked for me below.
Downloading and configuring memcached
The official distributions of memcached are written for Linux systems, so the first task is finding Windows binaries. The memcached project site, fortunately, has links to Windows binaries, which are hosted by NorthScale. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available.
(Note that NorthScale also offers their own . . .
→ Read More: Installing and configuring memcached and PHP on Windows
