Fixing the randomly stopping WsusPool IIS Application pool and Windows Updates failed 0x80244022 error

I was recently assisting a client with an upgrade of their Configuration Manager (SCCM) environment up to the latest release of 1702 and as part of that we’re also going over it’s currently deployed functionality and making sure it all works. They recently noted that clients were no longer receiving updates and ran the Software Update functionality of ConfigMgr, which funnily enough also relies on WSUS to sync up to Microsoft (but not push out the updates themselves).

So when troubleshooting Updating issues, you need to check both the Software Update Point and WSUS, and lowe and behold the WSUS console kept on crashing. After checking the Update Services service, I then turned to IIS and noticed the UpdatedServices Application pool had stopped, so I started it and went back into the console but soon noticed it had died again. After reading some advice on the TechNet forums they suggested raising the memory limit of the Wsus Application Pool, which is done by selecting the Application Pool Name and then clicking Advanced on the right hand side or right click menu. Scroll down to the bottom of the Advanced Settings Window until you see Private Memory Limit (KB) and increase this from the default of 1843200 (which is 1.8 GB) to 4194304 (which is 4 GB). Make sure you have enough RAM allocated to the machine, if you are feeling courageous you can also set the value to 0 which does not set a limit.

After increasing the available memory to the AppPool, WSUS synchronized successfully and clients were now receiving updates

Using LDAPS (Secure LDAP Binding) with Moodle for Sign-In running on IIS in a Windows Active Directory Domain

LDAP Server Settings in MoodleThe process for running LDAP queries via secure channel for Moodle is fairly straight forward. This method is not using a trusted certificate but is encrypting the traffic between Moodle and your Domain Controller to prevent snooping. The first thing you will want to do is install the latest OpenSSL binaries onto your Moodle Server. Once this is done, create a folder structure on the C drive like this C:\OpenLDAP\sysconf\ and create a new text file called ldap.conf, in its contents we can enter a single line;

TLS_REQCERT never

Now that OpenSSL is ready to go, restart IIS for good measure. Once things are back up we can enter Moodle, login as an Administrator and change the LDAP query from LDAP:// to LDAPS:// as well as the port from 389 to 636.

Browsing to Companyweb May Fail with HTTP Error 503 on SBS 2011 Standard after installing an Exchange 2010 update rollup

I was recently updating a client’s SBS Server and after giving it a restart I wasn’t able to browse their SharePoint 2010 site. After having a quick look at IIS I could see the SharePoint Application pool was stopped, so I started it up and after about 10 seconds, it stopped. So I went and looked in the Event Log and found the following error in the Application Event Log:

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles General
Event ID: 1509
Level: Warning
User: DOMAIN\spwebapp
Computer: SBSSERVER.domain.local

Description:
Windows cannot copy file C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration5212_100.sqm to location C:\Users\TEMP.DOMAIN\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration5212_100.sqm. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.

To fix the issue, we need to fix the permissions of the folder stated in the event log error above. We can do that by opening up Windows Explorer to the following location C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14. and then for each file in this folder identified in the matching event (Configuration5212_100.sqm in the error above), open its Properties and select the security tab. Then click Advanced and click on the Continue button to allow us to change the properties on the current window.  We then simply want to enable Inheritable permissions from this object’s parent.

This issue was caused by being a part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program which is what the SQM files are part of, for Exchange 2010 and subsequently installing an Exchange update rollup using automatic updates, in my case it was Update Rollup 5 for Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (KB2582113).

Fixing HTTP Error 500.21 – Internal Server Error Handler “WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated” has a bad module “ManagedPipelineHandler” in its module list on IIS.

I was recently developing some .net web applications at work and finally took the plunge of setting up a server to host them after I was happy that we had reached the point where they were usable applications.  So after setting up Server 2008 R2, I went ahead and enabled IIS with asp.net configuration enabled along with a host of other modules enabled to support what we were after. Gave the server a reboot and everything was up and ready to go.

Moved over to my development machine and instructed Visual Studio to publish an application to this newly setup web server, everything up until this point had worked perfectly, the web app published without any errors. So I opened up Internet explorer and low and behold error, page cannot be displayed. So I’m like maybe it’s a permissions thing, remoted into the web server and viewed it as a localhost and got Error 500.21 – Internal Server Error  Handler “WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated” has a bad module “ManagedPipelineHandler”.  I had gone ahead and configured an application pool for the web apps we were going to use, and everything seemed OK.  I then remembered something, in the good old IIS 6 days you had to run a .net registration program to notify IIS you had it installed and register the handlers for .net, but thinking to myself this is now 2008 R2, come on, it couldn’t be that.

I opened up an elevated command prompt window and navigated to C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319 and ran aspnet_regiis.exe -i causing asp.net to register itself with IIS and enable the handlers required to run .net pages.

After running this command I rebooted IIS and bang the web application started working.  An easy fix but a pity that it couldn’t have run automatically when I insist on installing asp.net under the IIS configuration.