Broken RWW & OWA on SBS 2008

Below is a situation we faced last week. First the problem, followed by the solution.

We had an SBS 2008 where RWW & OWA just quit.

We were using an SSL cert and not an self-signed cert. RWW loaded exactly the same everywhere, Internet, LAN & SBS server. No errors, just a page that looks like this:

From everywhere but the SBS server, OWA loaded a completely BLANK page. On the SBS server OWA loaded normally.

No obvious errors in the Event Viewer. I ran “Fix my Network” wizard and no offers to “fix” anything.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

I opened a ticket with Microsoft. I can tell you that 11 hours later, 7 of those on the phone with Microsoft, we were back online. I can also tell you what the solution WASN’T. My original support guy, who stuck with me the whole time was bound and determined to have Update Rollup 7 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 fix the problem. I’m afraid that just wasn’t in the cards. Long story short, it is always about getting the right guy on the bus, sitting in the right seat. Once we got Wayne McIntyre on the call we were “fixed” in less than an hour.

Below are Wayne's notes:

Here is a summary of what was discovered to resolve the issue yesterday afternoon.

1. In the IIS log we were getting a 500.19 =
configuration data is invalid for a list of all IIS 7
error codes see 943891 The HTTP status codes in IIS 7.0
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;943891

2. After getting a detailed error message from IIS 7 by disabling Forms Based Auth for OWA, we saw the invalid configuration data was in the web.config for the SBS Web Applications Site pointing to an invalid mimemap configuration shown below.

3. This mimemap was already defined at the server level in the applicationhost.config, therefore conflicted. We discovered these were added as a result of extending RWW to have remote app links with extension .rdp published on the site… Once we removed that entry from the web.config at the site level the issue was resolved.

Note we also modified the MimeType to = application/octet-stream at the server level to allow the .rdp links to work on the RWW page.

I should note that the "as a result of extending RWW to have remote app links" was in fact us Customizing the RWW landing page to offer 4 new links, two to run RemoteAPPs and two to actually install the RemoteAPP msi files. It just goes to show how sometimes the best intentions can go ary.

Also note that the changes that "broke" the system were made on Monday but the failure was not apparent until Thursday morning. I had actually tested the RemoteAPPs from the Autotask Summit in Nashville on Monday or Tuesday evening and all was well. It turns out that the IIS Application Pool resets at some random interval. The conflict became apparent after the reset.