Outlook on Evan Hoffman

Exchange CAS crashes, users get 503 when accessing OWA... but ActiveSync works

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:09:15 +0000

Since migrating to Exchange 2010, every couple of weeks it looks like IIS crashes on the CAS. Going to the OWA URL in a browser would yield a 503 error. Strangely enough, ActiveSync worked fine (though Outlook Anywhere over HTTPS didn’t). Rebooting the CAS resolved the issue.

This is what the logs show (Website Pulse reported the outage around 11:45):

Information	1/16/2011 11:59	EventLog	6013	None	The system uptime is 1726976 seconds.
Error	1/16/2011 11:43	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5002	None	Application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.
Warning	1/16/2011 11:43	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5011	None	A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '13180'. The data field contains the error number.
Warning	1/16/2011 11:43	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5011	None	A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '12856'. The data field contains the error number.
Warning	1/16/2011 11:42	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5011	None	A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '15328'. The data field contains the error number.
Warning	1/16/2011 11:41	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5011	None	A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was '11724'. The data field contains the error number.
Warning	1/16/2011 11:41	Microsoft-Windows-WAS	5009	None	A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '15868'. The process exit code was '0x800703e9'.
Information	1/16/2011 11:21	Service Control Manager	7036	None	The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the stopped state.

This happened before we had any antivirus on the machine (antivirus has been suggested as a culprit). The machine is Win 2008r2 x64 with all updates running Exchange 2010 with all updates.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

Office 2007 is pretty old by now, and I know much has been written on the move from a “normal” looking app to the “Ribbon” UI. I personally hate the change and feel Microsoft just changed the UI as a way to make the application look “different” so that people will look at it and go “oooh, shiny!” and not feel as bad about being forced into another $400 upgrade of a word processor. Sure, Excel’s row limit was finally raised beyond 64k, and I’m sure there were some other tweaks, but .docx? .xlsx? Yet more file formats, ensuring most businesses will feel compelled to upgrade. If your clients are upgrading, you’re going to have to.

Microsoft Office 2007's awful user interface

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:49 +0000

The Joy of Migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:57:13 +0000

I’ve been working on migrating from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 for several weeks. Actually, at this point it feels like several months. Now that I think about it, I guess that’s because it’s actually been several months.

Back in January or February, I got fed up with the Exchange setup I inherited: our Exchange 2003 server was running on a server in the basement of our office, on non-UPS power, with a power company that likes to pull shenanigans (like 3-4 hour outages every few months). In addition, the physical machine itself has some weird bug where it would hang at the POST screen complaining about some USB device, even though there are no USB devices plugged in, and USB is disabled in the BIOS. Meanwhile, in the datacenter, I had recently finished migrating most of our ancient physical servers to virtual machines on beautiful new hardware. It didn’t take long to see the solution that seemed to be obvious: move Exchange to the datacenter, in a VM.