Yesterday, 15:30 at the office of my current customer.
IM: “Could install the Communication Server today?”
What?
OK, we had made the required preparations on the Active Directory, but haven’t done any planing on how or where to place the servers. All I knew for certain at this point was that we had to install the enterprise version of Office Communication Server 2007 due to the amount of users.
So we ended up with four people installing the server on a virtual machine. After we ran the Schema, Forest and Domain prep tools we started installing the server, the database on a separate machine and started the service.
Everything seemed OK so far.
When we tried to test a client we could log on. The Eventlog indicated that the server name couldn’t be resolved by the DNS.
That’s why I love proper planning.
I remembered we had to add some SRV records to the DNS. So we looked through the installation manual and added some _sipinternaltls _tcp SRV records to each domain in the forest.
Next problem: The certificate could not be verified.
We couldn’t find any problem with the certificate, and tried some different options in the creation wizard. But still couldn’t log on.
After checking through all the logs on the client and the servers, we came to the conclusion this had to be a database problem, and since it already was 21:00 we called it quits for the day.
Today:
According to the error on the database server the service use of the OCS couldn’t perform write operations, but it had all the necessary permissions. After searching he net we found a KB article on the Microsoft website indicating we should install a patch, available through the support hotline (there wasn’t even a download on the premiere support site).
Well the patch worked fine on the OCS but failed on the SQL server, because it had more than one database instance.
So we moved the database to another server with a single instance.
And it finally worked… after 24h.
All of this trouble because management all of a sudden decided it had to start mass rollout of the Office Communicator next week.
