Re: SBS2003 Outlook HTTP/RPC not working

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In all of this self help and beating your head against a wall how much as this cost you? Honestly when I get to this level of frustration, if I were in your shoes I'd get the credit card out and call MS support.

When you said you made SBS work with Vista what did you do?

You've rerun the CEICW and you've gone into connectcomputer and you've followed the Outlook over http instructions on the workstation?

Dave Cattley wrote:
First let me say that I have been reading KB articles, blog entries, NG postings, and everything else I can find on troubleshooting RPC over HTTP in regards to Outlook and Exchange 2003; Indeed, I have been doing this off and on for a year with no result. I once again took up the torch this weekend determined to fix this issue and once again, I am defeated.

Of course, this all worked just fine before when it was Outlook 2003 on XP SP2 talking to SBS2003 +EX2K3RTM. Somewhere along the way in stream of upgrades and patches to bring the server up to SBS2003+SP1 and including EX2K3SP2 and the patches to make SBS2003 work with Vista and Outlook2007 this feature broke.

I have tried:
1. Re-running the Internet Connection Wizard of SBS2003 and letting it reset everthing.

2. Painstakingly going through all of the manual verification and diagnostics documented in every KB article I found on the subject including the document "Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 RPC over HTTP Deployment Scenarios".

3. Re-issued the (self-signed) SSL certificate, installed it to the Trusted Root Certificates on the workstations, and verified that SSL access to OWA and RWW work just fine (no cert issues).

4. Alternatively have used the RPC/HTTPS No Front-End tool by Mr. Harry Bates to set the RPC Proxy ports (no effect).

5. Bewildered myself with the use of RpcPing in an attempt to find what is broken. This at least reveals the "symptom"; Always "Exception 1722 (0x000006BA)" which except for being confirmed as a symptom of the RPC server itself not running, tells me nothing of use.

6. Ran Outlook 2003 with /rpcdiag. Again, other than telling me the obvious that it does not connect to the RPC services, it reveals nothing of substance.

7. Verifying that the RpcPing 'symptom' and behaviors are identical both inside & outside the firewall (they are).

8. Looked at volumes of IIS logs only to see what appears to be perfectly reasonable and acceptable HTTPS entries for the RPC_xxx_verb log lines with result always 200.

9. Verified (multiple times) that the NTDS and other service Parameter key values for such things as RPC configuration match the supposedly correct values in the KB articles.

10. Purchased the (complete waste) SBS2003 R2 upgrade. That simply resulted in a broken install of WUS that I did not want anyway. I discovered only after buying the R2 upgrade package that (except for WUS) it was mostly a redundant path to a bunch of patches and Service Packs I had allready painstakingly applied as they came out.

So, I am feeling really quite stupid of late. I have beaten this in self-help-solitude long enough only to arrive at failure repeatedly. It frost's me to no end that it all worked flawlessly when I first deployed SBS2003 years ago and that it broke when I started trying to make SBS2003 work with a new Vista laptop.

In conclusion, I don't know where to go from here. A complete re-install seems like a really stupid way to try and solve this since it is a single facility and heck, it ought to be possible to diagnose the problem, fix the configuration or environmental issue, and be done with it. It used to work!

The system is fully patched, has the latest Trend Client/ServerMessaging/SMB (or whatever it is called in the latest release), is currently in dual-'NIC' mode although has alternately been in both single-NIC and dual-NIC mode prior to the failure and both worked just fine.

The only thing I have to go on (and no knowledge of how to proceed) is that RpcPing consitently shows the 1722 failure as if the RpcProxy cannot talk to the actual RPC service. Now why on earth would that fail? Clearly the RPC services are available and working - I can use Outlook on the LAN with ncacn_tcp base RPC just fine. Communications to the RPC Proxy seems to work since NetMon traces and RpcPing tests show that the SSL connection is setup correctly.

So if anyone has any more guidance on the thing I missed, I would truly appreciate hearing it. I want my RPC over HTTP back.

Thanks,
-dave
.

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