As noted in one of my previous posts: CS 14 configuration information redundancy between servers (http://terenceluk.blogspot.com/2010/08/cs-14-configuration-information.html), CS 14 was designed to be less dependent on the backend SQL server and domain controllers. For the backend SQL server, CS 14’s configuration data is stored in CMS which is replicated to each server so in the event of the server not able to reach the SQL backend server, the services will be able to find the configuration in its local SQL database. In regards to the dependency OCS 2007 R2 had on domain controllers, services are now ran as “Network Service” instead of domain accounts so there is no need to access a domain controller to start a service ran as a service account.
After getting all excited about this, I ran into a situation where the services stopped after losing connectivity to the DC and SQL and I wasn’t able to start the service. The training environment consists of 2 hosts with virtual machines being hosted on them. My partner was host1 which had the DC and SQL virtual machines while host2 (my lab machine) had the CS front-end server. Sometime during the afternoon, my partner disabled his NIC card that connected to the lab switch so he could use the wireless card to get on the internet. I did not know he did this and noticed that my MOC that was signed into a user account was signed out. Not knowing about the DC and SQL not being started, I went ahead and began troubleshooting and after reviewing the event logs, I realized it was simply because the CS front-end server cannot start because it cannot reach SQL.
Since I wasn’t certain whether something else was causing this, I went ahead and rebooted the CS front-end server a few times and found that this behavior was consistent. Here are the details:
1. I restart the CS 14 front-end server with DC and SQL server inaccessible. The services slowly tries to start:
2. I see the Front-End service showing the status of “Starting” then after a minute shows that it’s “Stopping”:
3. Reviewing the System logs, I can see that the front-end service terminates with a generic message (I’ve seen a similar one before in OCS 2007 R2):
The Communications Server Front-End service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147016646
4. Other errors are also found in the System log:
5. Interestingly enough, there were no errors found in the application logs:
6. Further drilling deeper into the Communications Server logs, I can see a lot more errors being logged:
The A/V Authentication Service cannot be contacted. Connections require Firewall traversal….
7. Here’s another error that is logged which doesn’t really tell us much:
8. This error message is a bit better because I can immediately realize that the global catalog is not reachable by the front-end server:
9. Here’s another error that is probably logged because the service it is referencing is dependent on another service that could not start:
10. Finally, this is the error message that explicitly says SQL is not reachable:
Event ID: 32134
Failed to connect to back-end database. Communications Server will continuously attempt to reconnect to the back-end. While this condition persists, incoming messages will receive error responses.
11. Here is an error complaining about the presence component:
I’m not sure exactly why but I’ve restarted the front-end server a few times all day with the DC and SQL turned off but could not get the services up. I’ve asked the 2 instructors about this, 1 said they’re supposed to start and never offered to look (he didn’t seem interested) and the other said it should start but when I asked him to come over to have a look he said he needed to do the next presentation (fair enough) but never said he’ll have a look.
I don’t like push people to look at something if they’re not interested so I’m going to assume the following:
1. There is something wrong with these virtual machines and something else is causing this.
2. This is beta (not beta refresh), so certain features are buggy.
3. When CS 14 actually RTMs, I will build this in my own environment to test it again myself.
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