Overview

I’ve seen this issue a few times over the past months & most recently this past week with a customer. Luckily there’s a fairly simple fix to the issue published by Microsoft, but realizing not everyone remembers every Microsoft KB that gets released I thought I’d shine a spotlight on this one.

Scenario

As part of the migration process, when customers move their namespace from either Exchange 2007 or 2010 to 2013, HTTP connections start proxying through 2013 to the legacy Exchange Servers and some users will experience failures. The potential affected workloads are:

AutoDiscover

Exchange Web Services (Free/Busy)

ActiveSync

OWA

Outlook

Test or new mailboxes may not be affected.

Resolution

The cause of this is the age old problem of Token Bloat. Users being members of too many groups or having large tokens.

The fix is to implement the changes in the below Microsoft KB article

“HTTP 400 Bad Request” error when proxying HTTP requests from Exchange Server 2013 to a previous version of Exchange Server

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2988444

The interesting thing in this scenario is that the issue was not experienced in the legacy version of Exchange & even if you look at the tokens themselves, they may not seem overly large. It seems that the process of proxying Exchange traffic is much more sensitive to this issue. Also, in a recent case that went to Microsoft, even if you increase the recommended values to a value higher than your current headers it may not have the desired effect. In our case we had to set the MaxRequestBytes & MaxFieldLength values to exactly match the values in the Microsoft KB (65536 (Decimal)).

For further reading, please see the below articles.

Complimentary Articles

“HTTP 400 – Bad Request (Request Header too long)” error in Internet Information Services (IIS)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2020943

How to use Group Policy to add the MaxTokenSize registry entry to multiple computers

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/938118

Additional Note

As an FYI, another issue I commonly see when namespaces get transitioned to 2013 is authentication popups when connections proxy to the legacy Exchange Servers. Please see the below KB for that issue

Outlook Anywhere users prompted for credentials when they try to connect to Exchange Server 2013

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990117

I also blogged about it here

https://exchangemaster.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/exchange-2010-outlook-anywhere-users-receiving-prompts-when-proxied-through-exchange-2013/