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Archive for October, 2009

DO NOT APPLY KB974571 to LCS/OCS Servers

Hail patch Tuesday.  I woke up this morning to discover that my Access Edge server was offline and federation was broken.  After digging into the event logs this is what I found:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: OCS Server
Event Categeory: (1000)
Event ID: 12290
Description:
The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 has expired.  Please upgrade from the evaluation version to the full released version of the product.

WHAT?  Are you kidding me?  So I did some digging on the Internet and quickly came across Doug’s post.  He discovered that KB974571 is causing OCS/LCS servers to believe that they are running an evaluation version and have expired which in turn causes the services to shut down.

Until this patch is fixed I HIGHLY recommend that you delay the install of KB974571.

Click here for Doug’s post…

Forefront for OCS error on the Access Edge (Event ID: 10161 & 10162)

Symptoms

The IM Notification Agent on the Access Edge is failing with the following Application Log events:

 

Event ID: 10162
Type: Error
Source: ForefrontNotificationAgent
Description:
“ERROR: Microsoft.FSO.IMClient.dll.IMClient.RaiseLoginDone(“<System.Boolean success><System.String message>”) – Error occured logging in to server: 80072746: .”

 

AND

 

Event ID: 10161
Type: Error
Source: ForefrontNotificationAgent
Description:
“ERROR: ForefrontNotificationAgent.exe.NotificationAgent.imClient_LoginDone(“<System.Object sender><FSOIMClient.ReportSuccessEventArgs e>”) – Failed to login.”

 

More information

You have correctly setup the IM Notification Agent account per the instructions found here on TechNet for an Access Edge server.  You have verified the notification account id and password are accurate by logging in with the notification account from a remote client. Your IM Notification Agent settings look as follows:

IM Notification Agent settings

Use ForefrontRTCProxy Service Credentials: Unchecked
Transport: TLS
Username: domain\userid
Password: *****
SIP URI: sip:userid@company.com
Home or Pool Server: Director FQDN

 

SIP Logging on the director server shows a “SIP/2.0 301 Redirect request to Home Server” message with no response from the home pool.  This tells us that the Director server is treating the Forefront Notification Agent as an inside client and thus is trying to redirect the “client” to the notification account’s home pool.  The Director server should proxy the request, not redirect.  Remote user connections cannot be redirected.  Read here for more information on how a director behaves with internal vs. external clients. Changing the Home or Pool server settings to point to the notification account’s home pool FQDN does not solve the problem.

 

Resolution

Option 1

In the Home or Pool Server field add the FQDN entry for Access Edge external interface (sip.company.com).  However just changing the entry is not enough, you’ll also want to specify the port as follows “sip.company.com:443”.  This is of course assuming that your AE external interface FQDN is sip.company.com.  Make sure the Access Edge server correctly identifies the external FQDN to the correct IP address.  Changing to the AE FQDN will route the Forefront Notification Agent login request through the Access Edge service and then to the next hop server (Director).  The Director will then properly process the login request as a remote client.

Further SIP logging on the Director reveals a successful “Routed a request on behalf of an application” followed by a successful response from the account’s home pool.

IM Notification Agent settings

Use ForefrontRTCProxy Service Credentials: Unchecked
Transport: TLS
Username: domain\userid
Password: *****
SIP URI: sip:userid@company.com
Home or Pool Server: sip.company.com:443

 

Option 2

Another recent fix that was brought to my attention was to enter the SIP URI without the “sip:” prefix.  Your settings would be as follows:

IM Notification Agent settings

Use ForefrontRTCProxy Service Credentials: Unchecked
Transport: TLS
Username: domain\userid
Password: *****
SIP URI: userid@company.com (without sip: prefix)
Home or Pool Server: sip.company.com:443

 

Cause

As for the cause, I cannot speak to what is specifically causing this issue as I feel this is either a bug in the Forefront notification agent OR an error in the documentation.

OCS now talks to Jabber & Google Talk via an XMPP Gateway

A couple of big changes were announced at the end of last week:

  1. A PIC license will no longer be required for federation with AOL.
  2. Federation costs with Yahoo! will be reduced by 50%.
  3. A new XMPP Gateway for OCS 2007 R2 provides presence and two-party IM interoperability with the XMPP based systems of Jabber and Google Talk.

More Information

Click here to read the official announcement from the OCS Team…

Click here to download more information on the XMPP Gateway

XMPP Gateway limitations

  • Virtualization of the XMPP Gateway is not supported.
  • Collocation of the XMPP Gateway with other OCS roles is not supported.
  • Only plain text is supported.
  • Notes from OCS are not supported nor is custom status on the XMPP clients seen by OCS.
  • The XMPP Gateway will only federate with OCS 2007 R2 and OCS 2007.  LCS 2005 federation is not supported.
  • Messages from the MOC client are not delivered to the last active instance of the XMPP client when an XMPP user is logged in with two or more clients.
  • When an XMPP user adds an OCS buddy, the OCS user’s presence is not seen on the XMPP client until the OCS user’s presence changes.
  • Conferencing is not supported on the gateway.

Configuring the XMPP Gateway

Connectivity to Gmail…

Connectivity to Jabber XCP 5.4…