Exchange Server 2007 issues itself a self-signed certificate for use with services like SMTP, IMAP, POP, IIS and UM. The certificate is issued for a period of one year.
The self-signed certificate meets an important need – securing communication for Exchange services by default. Nevertheless, one should treat these self-signed certificates as temporary. It’s not recommended to use these for any client communication on an ongoing basis. For most deployments, you will end up procuring a certificate from a trusted 3rd-party CA (or perhaps an internal CA in organizations with PKI deployed).
However, should you decide to leave the self-signed certificate(s) on some servers and continue to use them, these need to be renewed – just as you would renew certificates from 3rd-party or in-house CAs.
To renew the certificate for server e12postcard.e12labs.com, a server with CAS and HT roles installed:
Get-ExchangeCertificate -domain „e12postcard.e12labs.com“ | fl
Note the services the certificate is enabled for (by default: POP, IMAP, IIS, SMTP on CAS + HT servers). Copy the thumbprint of the certificate.
Get a new certificate with a new expiration date:
Get-ExchangeCertificate -thumbprint „C5DD5B60949267AD624618D8492C4C5281FDD10F“ | New-ExchangeCertificate
If the existing certificate is being used for SMTP, you will get the following prompt:
Confirm
Overwrite existing default SMTP certificate,
‚C5DD5B60949267AD624618D8492C4C5281FDD10F‘ (expires 8/22/2008 7:20:34 AM), with certificate ‚3DA55740509DBA19D1A43A9C7161ED2D0B3B9E3E‘ (expires 1/28/2009 7:37:31 AM)?
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help
(default is „Y“):
Type y to continue. A new certificate is generated.
Thumbprint Services Subject
———- ——– ——-
3DA55740509DBA19D1A43A9C7161ED2D0B3B9E3E ….. CN=E12Postcard
The new certificate is generated and enabled. Examine the new certificate:
Get-ExchangeCertificate -thumbprint „3DA55740509DBA19D1A43A9C7161ED2D0B3B9E3E“ | fl
The old certificate is enabled for IIS, POP, IMAP and SMTP. The new certificate generated using the above command is enabled only for POP, IMAP and SMTP – IIS is missing.
To enable the certificate for IIS:
Enable-ExchangeCertificate -thumbprint „3DA55740509DBA19D1A43A9C7161ED2D0B3B9E3E“ -services IIS
This enables the certificate for IIS (in addition to any other services it may already be enabled for – it adds to existing values of the services property).
Test services are working with the new certificate. If it works as expected, the old certificate can be removed:
Remove-ExchangeCertificate -thumbprint „C5DD5B60949267AD624618D8492C4C5281FDD10F“
