CRES Maintenance...What will user's see when attempting to open an envelope?

[tsilveruits]

With the CRES maintenance March 21 (https://supportforums.cisco.com/announcement/12425896/cisco-registered-envelope-service-tls-certificates-and-maintenance), if a user does try to open an encrypted message, which directs them to CRES, what will they see? Will they see a page announcing that the service is down for maintenance as well as the downtime or will the request just time out or something?

[Robert Sherwin]

During the maintenance window it will not be possible to open PXE encrypted messages. CRES admins will not be able to log into the administration interface (https://res.cisco.com/admin) and senders of PXE encrypted messages may receive bounce messages.

All services will be restored once the upgrade is concluded. Any bounced messages can be resent at that time.

While the CRES servers are not available via HTTPS, the ESA should hold the emails in queue locally, retrying the connection periodically.  These emails will wait in this queue for the period configured in the encryption profile.  If the configured timeout period is exceeded, the email will bounce back to the user.

Please review your settings using the following steps:

1) Go to Security Services > Cisco IronPort Email Encryption

2) Click on the configured encryption profile(s)

3) Expand the 'Advanced' section

4) Review the 'Encryption Queue Timeout' setting

The default value is 14400 seconds (4 hours), so unless you may have changed this setting, a 2 hour maintenance window should not cause any emails to bounce.

And - just reminder - monthly maintenance does occur on the CRES service:

https://res.cisco.com/websafe/termsOfService

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE

The Service is subject to scheduled downtime from 10 AM to 12 PM Pacific Time on the first and third Saturday of every month.      

-Robert

[tsilveruits]

Thanks, Robert. I read those details in the announcement/blog, but it doesn't answer my question. What will someone see when they try to open a PXE encrypted message? It directs them to CRES, so will there be a landing page provided that announces to users that the service is down for maintenance?

Thanks.

Tim

[Robert Sherwin · Accepted solution]

It will be a timeout response.  Since the servers will not be online/active - browser session will just reach standard timeout, and if trying to open/decrypt via the plug-in, will just reach time out in Outlook.  No landing page during maintenance, I'll pass that along for recommendation and future considerations.

-Robert

[tsilveruits]

Thanks, Robert!