RPC Server Unavailable and other errors in the Admin Console

[Brian Donahue]

During operation of the ESA Admin Console, the following errors and behaviors may be seen:

• Unable to get the mailbox sizes
  
• RPC server is unavailable in the ESA Archive Service logs
  
• "COM surrogate has encountered an error and needed to close" in the event log
  
• Failure in dllhost.exe in the event log
  

In December 2009, Microsoft had made a change to the MAPI/Collaboration Data Objects that caused ESA's Exchange Abstraction Layer to fail. You may have installed this package as a prerequisite for the Archive Service in place of installing Outlook, for instance if you run the Archive Service directly on an Exchange 2007 server or on servers where installing Outlook would not be desirable.

You can tell if you need to downgrade MAPI/CDO by checking the versions of the files in your %programfiles%\ExchangeMapi folder:

• emsmdb32.dll version 6.5.8039 is the version that we know works properly
  
• emsmdb32.dll version 6.5.8153 does not work with ESA
  
• Possibly versions later than 6.5.8039 excluding the above (unconfirmed)

We are working on identifying the root cause of these problems, but in the meantime, we have made an older version of MAPI/CDO available to install. You may get this from our FTP site:
ftp://ftp.red-gate.com/development/exchange/ExchangeMapiCdo.MSI

Uninstalling your current MAPI/CDO components and installing from the link above should fix any RPC problems that occur in Exchange Server Archiver. Note that you may need to restart your server after installing the MAPI components, although the installer does not prompt you to do so.
_________________
Brian Donahue
Technical Support
Red Gate Software Ltd.
44 (0)870 160 0037 ext 8521
US and CAN 1-866-RED GATE ext 8521

[Brian Donahue]

NOTE: This information is no longer relevant for ESA version 3 or higher. There is a MAPI compatibility chart that should assist you in choosing the right MAPI version.
_________________
Brian Donahue
Technical Support
Red Gate Software Ltd.
44 (0)870 160 0037 ext 8521
US and CAN 1-866-RED GATE ext 8521