I have been working on setting up a test Microsoft dynamics CRM server on a server at home with Internet facing deployment. I wanted to try to see how CRM hosted will work. I have been through few issues that thankfully I managed to resolve them all. I will write another post specifically focusing on the deployment and IFD but for now, I want to focus on a quick issue that I had.

After the Microsoft Dynamics CRM was setup fine, I used the IFD tool (available free on Microsoft downloads website) to allow the Internet facing feature for the CRM server. On the IFD tool there is a list of machines that you can tell the IFD tool about. This is called “IFD Internal Network Address and Subnet Mask”.  The first thing that came to mind on seeing this is that it is for the internal computers that are allowed access to the server. Reading through the IFD documentation, I found out that it is actually the opposite. This list of machines IPs is the list of IPs for computers which are not allowed access to the Dynamics CRM server from the Internet (IFD). i.e. Any computer with an IP in this list, it will only be allowed to connect to the CRM server internally but if you attempt to access CRM Server externally from this machine, it will not even get to the authentication form.

So assume you added to this list in the IFD tool a computer with IP 192.168.1.88.

If you attempt to connect with this machine to the Dynamics CRM server using the internal address for example: http://localhost/CRM/, this will work find.

But if you attempt to connect from this machine to the CRM server using the external address: http://www.yourcrmserverdomainname.com/ then this will NOT work.

I would refer to this list as the internal addresses banned from accessing the dynamics CRM server externally.

I had this issue and I was trying to access the CRM server externally with another machine at home but I wasn’t able to and then I found out that I should actually remove this machine’s IP address from the list in order to be able to access it.

Hope this will ever help someone!

Mohamed Ibrahim