Instantiating the OrganizationServiceProxy for IFD enabled organizations.

Last week was an interesting week at work, highlights include running an application from my laptop against the live service.

It took me a while to get this working because I was using the wrong endpoint, D'oh, and the wrong type of credentials, double D'oh.

In any case, here it is for posterity:

public class IFDCrmService

    {
        const string ServiceUrl = "https://{0}/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc";

        public static IOrganizationService GetIFDCrmService()
        {
            ClientCredentials credentials = new ClientCredentials();
            credentials.UserName.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UserName"];
            credentials.UserName.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Password"];

            if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FQDN"] == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("FQDN key missing."); }
            string fqdn = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["FQDN"]; 
        
            return new OrganizationServiceProxy(new Uri(string.Format(ServiceUrl, fqdn)), null, credentials, null);
        }
    }

The relevant part of the app.config is below:

<appSettings>
    <add key="UserName" value="dev\crmapppool" />
    <add key="Password" value="P@55w0rd1" />    
    <add key="FQDN" value="crmdev.dev.com"/>
 </appSettings> 

It's always a good idea to encrypt the passwords but I won't discuss this today here.

Using ARR (Reverse Proxy) with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 - IFD

In this post I'll discuss how we have used the Application Request Routing module from IIS to expose Ms Dynamics CRM to the big bad world.

In this project I'm working on at the moment we want to allow authorized third parties to access to our application, which means that there has been a lot of discussions around what's the best way of doing this.

The Problem:

We want to allow third parties access to our MS Dynamics CRM 2015 system but these third parties might be mom and pop operations so federating with them is not an option. In reality, this is a fantasy conjured up by the PM, but we all go along with it, because sometimes it's important to know which battles to fight.

We also don't want to expose our MS Dynamics CRM 2015 servers to the big bad internet.

The Solution:

Use ARR to expose the MS Dynamics CRM 2015 website to the outside world, while keeping the servers happily inside the perimeter.

This is an architecture diagram of what we are trying to achieve.

I'm assuming that you have a working MS Dynamics CRM 2013/2015 installation configured for Internet Facing Deployment and a wildcard certificate for the appropriate domain available.

Install ARR.

Navigate to this page and click on install this extension, which will use the Windows Platform installer to install ARR, just follow the instructions therein. Alternatively you can do it manually, which I haven't tried.

Configure ARR

ARR is configured from the IIS Manager console.

So fire it up (windows key + r -> inetmgr)  and let's get started:

We first create a Server Farm for the MS Dynamics CRM Web Servers. If you have web and application CRM servers then you only need to add the web servers. We have full servers.

Ensure you add all servers, not just one server, unless you only have one server like myself in this environment :)

If you are only using ARR to expose MS Dynamics CRM to the outside world, then it's probably ok to click yes here.

 We can now configure our server farm.

We want to make sure that traffic is only directed to servers that are up and running so I normally set the organization's wsdl page as the health test URL. The server's page (using FQDN) should also work and in fact should be used if you have more than one organization.

The other thing that needs to be done is to set load balancing to be a based on Client affinity, in other words, a client will always hit the same server, unless that server is down. This is an optional step, that's only required, as far as I can tell, for reports.

We now need to check that the routing rule is correct for the current set up.

Pretty simple, as we're sending everything that hits this server onward to the MS Dynamics CRM Farm. However, the rule will, by default, forward it to http rather than https, so this needs to be changed.

The final step is to create the proxy websites. I'm going to assume that a wildcard certificate has been installed already for the server. These website will receive the traffic from the internet and forward it to the MS Dynamics CRM Web Servers.

When using IFD, a website is needed for each organization and another one for the auth website. You can also add one for the discovery service, but as far as my limited testing goes, it works without it.

At this point ARR is configured, now all that remains is to set up name resolution.

I normally use CNAME aliases for auth, disc and the various organizations to point to the ARR server:

stark.dev.local --> ARR Server (Organization)
auth.dev.local --> ARR Server  (auth)
disc.dev.local --> ARR Server   (discovery)

In my next post I will add ADFS to the reverse proxy, note that it's perfectly acceptable to use ARR for this purpose as well, but it also possible to use WAP, which provides pre-authentication.

Create Relying Party Trust for Microsoft Dynamics CRM from Powershell

I've configured Claims based authentication and IFD for MS Dynamics CRM more times than I care to remember and every time I do it manually, on the basis that it just doesn't take that long, which is true but it's also very tedious, so I spent some time creating a script to create the Relying Party Trust needed for MS Dynamics CRM claims based authentication and IFD to work. Obligatory XKCD.

I've only tried this script with ADFS 3.0 and MS Dynamics CRM 2015, but it should work for MS Dynamics CRM 2013 as well.

It's also possible to pass a file with the claims, using the IssuanceTransformRulesFile and IssuanceAuthorizationRules flags instead for the Add-AdfsRelyingPartyTrust command.

The script should be run after MS Dynamics CRM has been configured for Claims based authentication from the ADFS server.

The script can be also used to create the Relying Party trust for an Internet Facing Deployment and again it needs to be run after IFD has been configured in MS Dynamics CRM.

param ([string]$Name, [string]$Identifier)

if (-not ([Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal] [Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).IsInRole([Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole] "Administrator"))
{
    Write-Warning "You do not have Administrator rights to run this script!`nPlease re-run this script as an Administrator!"
    break
}

if (-not($Name))
{
 Write-Host "Name is a mandatory parameter. This should be the name of the Relying Party Trust"
 break
}

if (-not($Identifier))
{
 Write-Host "Identifier is a mandatory parameter. This will normally be of the form: https://<fqdn crm>/"
 break
}

$Identifier = $Identifier.Trim("/")

#These are the Transform Rules needed for CRM to work.
$transformRules='@RuleTemplate = "PassThroughClaims"
@RuleName = "Pass through UPN"
c:[Type == "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/upn"]
 => issue(claim = c);

@RuleTemplate = "PassThroughClaims"
@RuleName = "Pass through primary SID"
c:[Type == "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/primarysid"]
 => issue(claim = c);

@RuleTemplate = "MapClaims"
@RuleName = "Transform Windows Account name to Name"
c:[Type == "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname"]
 => issue(Type = "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name", Issuer = c.Issuer, OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer, Value = c.Value, ValueType = c.ValueType);'

#A single Authorization Rule, i.e. let everybody thru. Could tie down further if needed.
$authRules='@RuleTemplate = "AllowAllAuthzRule"
 => issue(Type = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/authorization/claims/permit",
Value = "true");'

#Copied and pasted this from a CRM 2011/ADFS 2.1 RPT
$imperRules ='c:[Type =="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/primarysid", Issuer =~"^(AD AUTHORITY|SELF AUTHORITY|LOCAL AUTHORITY)$" ] => issue(store="_ProxyCredentialStore",types=("http://schemas.microsoft.com/authorization/claims/permit"),query="isProxySid({0})", param=c.Value );c:[Type == "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/groupsid",Issuer =~ "^(AD AUTHORITY|SELF AUTHORITY|LOCAL AUTHORITY)$" ] => issue(store="_ProxyCredentialStore",types=("http://schemas.microsoft.com/authorization/claims/permit"),query="isProxySid({0})", param=c.Value );c:[Type =="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/proxytrustid", Issuer=~ "^SELF AUTHORITY$" ] => issue(store="_ProxyCredentialStore",types=("http://schemas.microsoft.com/authorization/claims/permit"),query="isProxyTrustProvisioned({0})", param=c.Value );'

Add-AdfsRelyingPartyTrust -Name $Name -Identifier $Identifier -IssuanceTransformRules $transformRules -IssuanceAuthorizationRules $authRules -ImpersonationAuthorizationRules $imperRules

Set-AdfsRelyingPartyTrust -TargetName $Name -MetadataUrl $($Identifier + "/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml") -MonitoringEnabled $true -AutoUpdateEnabled $true

Update-ADFSRelyingPartyTrust -TargetName $Name

This is what I ran to create the relying party trust for Claims based authentication:

 .\CRMRPT.ps1 -Name "crm2015 - CBA" -Identifier "https://crm2015.dev.local/" 

and this tocreate the relying party trust for IFD:

 .\CRMRPT.ps1 -Name "crm2015 - IFD" -Identifier "https://auth.dev.local/"

Unable to Navigate to external domain (auth endpoint) in MS Dynamics CRM 2013/2015 IFD

The standard practice for my company when deploying web servers is to use a host header, which probably made sense at some point but it surely made for an interesting Friday.

I'm tired, so I will just present the facts: If you are configuring IFD and can't get to the external domain endpoint, the problem might be that you have a host header for your https binding.

The external domain endpoint is normally: https://auth.adomain.com/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml and is the last step on the configure IFD wizard.

Ensure that IIS is configured without a host header for the https binding:

Configuring IFD for MS Dynamics CRM 2011

I've started going through the various training manuals for the MS Dynamics CRM Certification exams and one of the things that I had never done before was to configure an Internet Facing Deployment, so I grabbed Microsoft's white paper and went to work. I am not going to provide a step by step of what I've done, if that's what you are after have a look at this post on the InteractiveWebs blog, I just wanted to comment on the issues that I encountered.

In the white paper it wasn't too clear, I did skim through it rather than read it in detail, that it was geared towards a single server (CRM + ADFS 2.0) setup, so that it had, for me, some unnecessary steps, or quite a lot as for some reason I started using port 444 halfway through, which needless to say did not make life any easier.

I've still not had time to go through everything in detail, I just got it working, but I cannot really understand the terminology, when you configure IFD you have to provide the following:

• Web Application Server Domain
• Organization Web Server Domain
• Discovery Web Service Domain

but these simply point to you CRM Server yet you still need these (I imagine, I've not tried odd values here), which means that you also need to add DNS entries, preferably CNames to make life easier, for it to work.

 

You also need an orgname.mydomain.com DNS entry to actually access you IFD externally, which technically means that you need to buy that domain so that it can be accessed externally, unless you are configuring IFD for the sake of it, like I am.