Another Reason Why Browsing CompanyWeb May Fail with HTTP Error 503 on SBS 2011 Standard

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby and Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support]

We have found a second, somewhat less common, issue that can cause the error described previously in “HTTP Error 503 Accessing Company Web on SBS 2011 Standard”. You may experience this problem if you opted in to join the Customer Experience Improvement Program for Exchange 2010 and subsequently installed an Exchange update rollup using automatic updates (WSUS/MU).

In addition to the “HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable” error in IE, you will also see the following event in the application log (note that some of the path names may be slightly different):

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles General
Event ID: 1509
Level: Warning
User: CONTOSO\spwebapp
Computer: SERVER.contoso.local

Description:
Windows cannot copy file C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration14400_100.sqm to location C:\Users\TEMP.CONTOSO.005\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14\Configuration14400_100.sqm. This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.

DETAIL - Access is denied.

In the System log you will also see the following:

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Event ID: 5022
Level: Warning
Computer: SERVER.contoso.local
Description:
The Windows Process Activation Service failed to create a worker process for the application pool 'SBS Sharepoint AppPool'. The data field contains the error number.

Event Xml:
<EventData>
<Data Name="AppPoolID">SBS Sharepoint AppPool</Data>
<Binary>2B010780</Binary>
</EventData>
</Event>

Note: The error code 2B010780 is 8007012B in Words.

Resolution

To recover from this situation:

1. Use explorer to open the following location C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server\v14.
2. For each file in this folder identified in the matching event (Configuration14400_100.sqm in our example), open its Properties.
3. Select the Security Tab.
4. Click Advanced.
5. Click Continue.
6. Check the “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent” checkbox.
7. Repeatedly click Ok to close all the dialogs.
8. From an administrative command prompt, run IISRESET /noforce
   Note: you may have to run this command several times until it concludes successfully.

More Information

By default, installations of Exchange 2010 in SBS 2011 standard are not configured to join the program, but this could have been manually changed from the Exchange Management Console or during a manual installation of Exchange.

In order to tell if you have this setting enabled, you can do the following:

1. Launch an administrative Exchange Management Shell
2. Run the following command: (Get-OrganizationConfig).customerfeedbackenabled
   If the result is True, then you are joined to the program.

For more information please check:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd297945.aspx