Waveformation

I ran across an issue deploying an OCS 2007 R2 Standard Edition Server today. Web Component validation failed and attempts to browse to the GroupExpansion or Abs virtual directories results in a HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable. Upon further investigation, the LSGroupExpAppPool application pool in IIS was disabled. The application pool would become disabled as soon as IIS received a request for any application running under the pool. When this occured, the following event was logged:

Event ID: 5021

Source: Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)

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Today I was told about a certificate issue that can cause problems when OCS servers are deployed with certificates that implement the SHA-2 algorithm (SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512). The Cryptographic Service Provider in Windows XP SP2 and 2003 SP2 and older does not support these algorithms. Newer Operating Systems like Vista and Server 2008 provide support for these algorithms by default.

When applying this limitation to OCS, you may see the following error in the event log of a Communicator client on an older OS when certificates using these algorithms are deployed:

Source: Schannel
Event ID: 36876
Description: The certificate received from the remote server has not validated correctly. The error code is 0×80096004. The SSL connection request has failed. The attached data contains the server certificate.

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So you may have read some blog posts about the perils of installing OCS SUS, to update the Tanjay device. I recently attempted this myself and hit several glitches. This is definitely not an easy procedure.

When you begin with the OCS SUS Deployment Guide, it assumes that you have a SharePoint site collection at http://<hostname-of-sharepoint-server> listening on port 80. The SUS SharePoint site MUST be located at http(s)://<hostname-of-sharepoint-server>/sites/UCUpdateServer. The UCUpdateServer site will be created by the SUS SharePoint installation process but the root Site Collection must already exist for the Deployment Guide to make any sense. The Deployment Guide refers to the root site collection as SharePoint-80.

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I was one of the unfortunate who happened to install the update Tuesday night. I followed Scott Roberts’ instructions for fixing the EWS web.config, but I had an additional anomaly. Throughout the entire web.config were randomly scattered NULL characters which had replaced valid characters. So for some people, a find and replace on %ExchangeInstallDir% might not completely solve the issue. Try opening the web.config up in a better text editor that is capable of displaying non-text ASCII characters. I used Notepad++ for this. You will still have to find and fix the NULL characters by hand. See the MS Exchange team blog entry for more info.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/09/11/449787.aspx

Got this error when trying to install a new instance of SQL 2005 Standard on Windows Server 2003 R2:

SQL Server Setup failed to modify security permissions on registry key SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.X\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib for user Username. To proceed, verify that the account and domain running SQL Server Setup exist, that the account running SQL Server Setup has administrator privileges, and that the registry key  exists on the destination drive.

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