It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, but I figured I need to start up again. After moving into my official office, I had to tweak a few things on my server (commercial connection vs home connection) and ran into a weird issue.
For those that are noticing that when you restart your server, whether it be a dedicated Exchange box or an SBS box, you and all your Exchange users may notice that email “doesn’t work” anymore.
You may also notice that sending mail doesn’t work anymore.
Upon logging into your machine, you find that 1 or 2 Services failed to start properly in the Exchange group:
- Microsoft Exchange Transport Service, even set to Automatic, doesn’t start. Manually starting it takes a few seconds, but it works.
- Microsoft Exchange Information Store fails as well, even set to Automatic. Manually starting it takes about 45 seconds to a minute, but it works.
Now, you’ve got email working, but what caused it. A quick check in your event logs lists:
- The server {“Sector-Plural-ZZ-Alpha”} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout. (Sorry, I had to… Here’s the real ID: C1F1173B-21B1-11D2-849B-006008198DC0)
- The FSCController service hung on starting.
- The FSEIMC service depends on the FSCController service which failed to start because of the following error:
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state.
- The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service depends on the FSCController service which failed to start because of the following error:
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state.
- The Microsoft Exchange Transport service depends on the FSEIMC service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.
- ..and then, the POP3 connector fails, if you’re using that.
If you did some real digging, you may have seen this as well:
"ERROR: Unable to retrieve internet monitor interface."
"ERROR: SybLicense: Failed to create MSXML instance: -2147221008"
"ERROR: LICENSING: Invalid initialization parameters!"
"ERROR: CoCreateInstance failed in GetLists (0x800401F0)"
What fun. A whole lot of info about…nothing.
So, what caused it and how do you fix it?
Well, in short – you, or someone in a responsible role, caused it. Don’t worry, I did the same thing.
The culprit here is that you installed Forefront Security and failed to renew after the trial period. If you did renew after the trial period, “something” magical and un-wonderful happened – it broke something.
The Fix
This is a two part fix.
If you can’t send mail, follow this link (You can also use this to register the DCOM event ID). I just don’t feel like completely copying KB articles.
If you can send mail, either renew your license with Forefront, disable the Exchange connector, or uninstall Forefront.
From what I’ve seen, Microsoft knows that there is an issue, but officially isn’t calling it a bug yet.