Thursday 20 January 2011

SBS 2011 Exchange 2010 SP1 – Outlook Web Access HTTP 500 Error

This is a strange situation in that everything was working fine. Because we are in the middle of a migration from SBS v7 to SBS 2011 on our network there are a lot of changes going on because of the migration.

So, it is tough to pinpoint exactly when OWA on SBS 2011 stopped working.

When we hit our SBS 2011 OWA to log on we get the following:

image

Punch in a username and password and we are greeted with:

image

There are very few results in our search attempts but it turned out that the second item in our Bing search did the trick:

image

  • Microsoft Exchange Forms-Based Authentication service: Not Running.

The Recovery tab for the service shows “Restart the Service” for all three options. Yet, the service is not running.

So, we go ahead and start the service:

image

Sure enough, we were able to get in:

image

Hat tip: Henrik Walther Blog on MSExchange.org: Exchange 2010 SP1 – Experiencing an OWA HTTP 500 Error?

As Henrik indicates, the cause of the no-start situation with the FBA service is unknown at this point. We will be keeping an eye on this one for our SBS 2011 installs post reboot.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

this just happened to me on a 2003 to 2011 sbs migration so it can't be related to your v7 you mentioned. It resulted in not only OWA not working the same as you but also no Outlook client could connect either. Starting that service took care of OWA, however it is still coming up asking for a login to outlook even when I've tried manually recreating the Outlook profiles. Diving into event viewer now.

Anonymous said...

Ok, there's another service we had stopped. That's the Exchange RPC Client Access service. Once that was started Outlook worked again too. No word on whether it survives a reboot or not.

Anonymous said...

We had the same problem on a migration from 2003 and the issue persisted. We set a startup delay on this and the Exchange RPC service and both start after reboots now.

Jack said...

Elder
Your site is killer! I have set up 5 SBS 2011 servers this year. The most recent I have seen the MS Exc Forms Based & RPC Client fail on reboot even after the "source server" has been removed and is continuing. There is a fix thast adds startup dependencies for these that actually made things worse for me. I am wondering why iI did not see this on the 1st four...I did see the Forms act up while migrating on the 1st one but the cleared up. Thanks

Anonymous said...

Add me to the list of those with less hair because of this issue. I had no OWA nor could any Outlook Client connect. Starting these services immediately fixed it. Thank You!

Anonymous said...

Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
This fixed no client access and now OWA access issues after migrating from SBS 2008 to SBS 2011.

Anonymous said...

WOW. Today, about the 20th time the server has been rebooted since we migrated, everyone lost outlook etc.
I spent hours changing certificates blah blah blah and finally found this post.
Sure enough, both these services had failed to restart when the server came back up. So much for restart on fail...
Anyhoo...MANY MANY thanks for posting.