Synchronizing Remote IP Ranges Across Recieve Connectors

Exchange 2010 and later do a nice job of providing high availability with database availability groups (DAGs) and load balancing. However, one configuration detail doesn't automatically synchronize between multiple Exchange servers, and that is receive connectors.

If you create receive connectors for relaying output from printers or scanners then the connector you create is unique on each server. That's fine if you are pointing the devices at individual Exchange servers but to have high availability, you need multiple load balanced servers with the same configuration. To do this, you need to create the same receive connectors on each server.

During intial setup creating 2 or 4 receive connectors with the same settings for authentication and such isn't too big a deal. The item that's a pain is the remote IP ranges that are allowed to use the receive connector. Many organizations have a large list of individual IP addresses that are allowed to use the receive connector.

If there is a list of 50 individual IP addresses, it's a long process to enter once, let alone multiple times. Not to mention, there is the risk of administrators adding or removing IP addresses to the list on one server, but not others, or typos.

Here is a quick and easy way to synchronize the remote IP ranges from a receive connector on one server to another.

$Source=Get-RecieveConnector Server\ConnectorName
$Destination=Get-ReceiveConnector Server\ConnectorName
Set-ReceiveConnector $Destination -RemoteIPRanges $Source.RemoteIPRanges

In the example above:

• $Source is the connector you are copying the remote IP ranges from
• $Destination is the connector your are copying the remote IP ranges to

It is not necessary to use a variable for the destination receive connector. I did that to clarify what is happening in the Set-ReceiveConnector command. You could put the identity of the destination receive connector directly in the Set-ReceiveConnector command.

If you need to do this on a regular basis, you can put the receive connector into an array and use a foreach loop to set them all in a script like this:

$Source=Get-RecieveConnector Server\ConnectorName
$Destination=Get-ReceiveConnector | Where { $_.name -like "Relay*"}

ForEach ($d in $Destination) {
    Set-ReceiveConnector $d -RemoteIPRanges $Source.RemoteIPRanges
}