Exchange 2010 Management Console Broke - getcomputersite

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Wow - I never thought Exchange server would change so drastically in one revision :)

For the record, exchange 2010 is VERY different than other versions.  If you are into tinkering like we are, beware.  In the past it was safe to mess around a little bit with the way the virtual hosts on your exchange server bind so that you can play with the default website a bit more than you would want to with the site containing all the exchange items.

This is bad.

What we just did: added a vhost to bind to port 80, an hostname, that would just redirect you to the other virtual host on port 443 (where Exchange items are sitting)

Seems simple enough?

What we found: Exchange management console broke the next time we tried to open it, said it couldn't find a server.  The error did have the string 'http' in it, which should have been a clue sooner. (took me 40 minutes to figure out!)

We got an error saying 'getcomputersite' failed, we think it was a coincidence that there were also errors from mad.exe and others saying it couldn't contact a GC.  When we switched back the vhost config to default, everything seems to have started working again.

It appears other parts of the infrastructure rely on HTTP (not even HTTPS) for functionality - if you are aware of this your tweaks will be happier!