Exchange 2007: Many services not starting - solved!

Written byBy: Mario Rimann.

Our Exchange 2007 Server seems to be a box full of surprises - just look at myother blog posts on this topic . Todays story is about installation of Windows Updates. Usually a painless thing that we do in the early morning or late in the evening to not disrupt our staff.

This morning, an Exchange Rollup Packages was installed, the server restarted - and the server was broken. Of the approx. 15 Exchange services, more than half didn't start. Even manual starting of the services didn't help. The event log showed just the notification from the Services Manager, telling that the service couldn't be started - but no details.

After fiddling around for some time, we started asking Google about that issue. Pretty soon we've found a possible solution: Exchange 2007 tries to download CRL files - and silently fails if that download does not work!

Well, in many situations, HTTP traffic from the Servers to the Internet are allowed. But not in our case.

As soon as the firewall rule was changed to allow outgoing HTTP traffic from that server, all services started without problem.

Rant: Come on Microsoft, how stupid is this? At least a message in the eventlog wouldn't be too expensive (and would help extremely to fight that issue). Just failing silently is really annoying!