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What is the best way to handle an Exchange autodiscover request on a linux web server? Currently it looks for example.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml. Since this page doesn't exist it throws a 404. I'd like to keep the 404s to a minimum so they don't show up in the logs.

Would a permanent redirect be sufficient?

This is a new service that our IT is implementing and I want to create the least load to the web server. I'm not even sure why it has to hit the top level domain and involve the web server. But, from what I've read this seems to be how it's designed to work.

Any help or insight is appreciated.

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By default the autodiscover service will try the root domain first before trying autodiscover.example.com. The client doesn't notice and it continues on just fine.

There are ways in the registry to prevent clients like Lync and Outlook from using the root domain lookup and always using autodiscover.example.com instead. There's just not a way to do it on a global scale unless you deploy these settings to all clients via GPO/etc. and even then you don't touch smartphones, ipads, etc.

So, yeah, your best bet is a redirect on the web server if you don't want the 404s to accumulate (and they will quickly). Another option if apache can do it (I'm not an apache admin) might be to suppress/auto-discard 404 errors for this particular url. But most likely a permanent redirect to the correct url of autodiscover.example.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml will suffice. Either way, the traffic is going to hit your webserver unfortunately.

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  • Thanks. I kinda figured this would be the answer. I just wanted to double check and make sure I wasn't missing anything.
    – MAZUMA
    Sep 18, 2013 at 12:57

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