Unified Comm

Announced today at PDC and Twitter'd by @DrRez - a nice portal/landing page for OCS resources. Hopefully some of my articles will end up on there someday.

So I have a history of getting interesting projects, whether they start out relatively simple or are complex from the start. Sometimes, the seemingly standard/not-out-of-the-ordinary deployments end up with the most obscure problems. So far, I've only seen this happen once and was able to recreate it the issue as long as the same Active Directory information was used.

Background on the scenario:
Install any OCS role that depends heavily on WMI (practically all of them - the only roles not affected were the Archiving, Monitoring, and Communicator Web Access roles) on a Server 2008 SP2 server with .NET 3.5 SP1 and the usual post-3.5 SP1 updates (KB 958481 + 958483 + 958484).

Upon reboot, the networking stack would not come online and the system would stall during logon at the "Applying Internet Explorer Policy" or "Preparing Desktop". After waiting for the failed services to finally stall out (varies per server role), you will notice that most or all of the OCS related services are stuck at 'Starting'. RDP will be unavailable. The network icon will show as if the cable is disconnected.

If you set all the OCS services to 'Manual' and reboot, everything will start up normally. If you log in and start up the services manually, everything works fine. Obviously, this isn't an ideal setup for a production server.

During a sleepless weekend of research, I bumped into a few others that had experienced the same issue, most notably here. We ended up using the work around of placing all the OCS services dependent on wmiApSrv. In addition to that, we also changed the services startup from "Automatic" to "Automatic (delayed)".

Soon after, Ben Kohn (@axilar) found an interesting Server 2008 specific KB article that seemed to explain the situation completely, namely KB 2004121.

For future installs that have this problem, if I run into it again, I'll be doing the following, which comes from the above mentioned KB article:

To resolve this issue we need to modify the behavior of HTTP.SYS to depend on another service being started first.

1. Open Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Serivces\HTTP and create the following Multi-string value: DependOnService
3. Double click the new DependOnService value that you created
4. Enter CRYPTSVC in the Value Data field and click OK

The only aspect that I am still fuzzy on - why doesn't this show up in more OCS installs under Server 2008? Is it configuration specific? Obviously the CRYPTSVC isn't getting triggered on demand properly which in turn is causing the HTTP services to fail to start, which in turn causes this cascading OCS service/networking failure.

I'm glad it is fixable and you can work around it but I'm still puzzled.

As noted here, the OCS team has setup a page on TechNet that lists the latest updates and download links for:

Server side (as of 11-17-09):

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (3.5.6907.56)
Cumulative Updates for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - October 2009

Update for OCS 2007 R2 Database – July 2009

Standalone all-in-one updater for every server role (except July 2009 SQL database update mentioned above - must be installed otherwise Dial-in Audio Conferencing and other functionality will break - needs SQL 2005/2008 workstation client tools installed from SQL 2005/2008 installation media)

October 2009 ASN fix for OCS Front End and Edge roles due to KB 974571 (MS09-056)

Speech Server 2007 R2
Update for Speech Server 2007 R2 – April 2009

Group Chat Server 2007 R2 (3.5.6907.41)
Update for Group Chat Server 2007 R2 – July 2009
Update for Group Chat Server 2007 R2 Administration Tool - July 2009

Best Practices Analyzer (3.0.6362.80)
Office Communications Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer

Client side (as of 11-17-09):

Office Communicator 2007 R2 (3.5.6907.56)
Update for Office Communicator 2007 R2 – October 2009
Mac Messenger 7.0.2

Office Live Meeting (8.0.6362.143)
Update for Live Meeting 2007 Client – September 2009 (latest version is always located here)
Update for Live Meeting 2007 Conferencing Add-in for Outlook – September 2009 (latest version is always located here)

Group Chat Client 2007 R2 (3.5.6907.41)
Update for Group Chat Client 2007 R2 – July 2009

Attendant 2007 R2 (3.5.6907.37)
Update for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Attendant – July 2009

Office Communicator Phone Edition 2007 R2 - Tanjay (3.5.6907.55)
Update for Office Communicator Phone Edition 2007 R2 – October 2009

Office Communicator Mobile 2007 R2 (6906.28)
Update for Office Communicator Mobile 2007 R2 – July 2009 (latest version is always located here)

It is cool that they have done this because I've had a blog entry stuck in Draft mode ever since the July and October 2009 updates for OCS were released. It was going to be a two part post that I had planned on publishing shortly.

The first part would have been much like the diagram/links posted here and the links above are a mixture of that chart and my original post.

The second part would have been links to the individual KB articles and the download binaries and which download binaries matched up with the KB articles. If you downloaded each part individually, it was very easy to mismatch the .MSP files with the server roles/KB articles. I am going to make an abbreviated version of the original post after this one because there are some aspects that are still valid/noteworthy.

If you want a quick reference for customers or yourself, which seems to be updated as more products become supported under 2008 R2, go to the Microsoft website here.

The most interesting aspect, at least to me, is that there looks to be upcoming support for Server 2008 R2 for OCS 2007 R2 and later versions, and as mentioned on the Exchange blog, support for Exchange 2007 SP2+. The reversal of support on Exchange is a very welcome one in my eyes.