Weird issue - System Attendant depends on Dell Openmanage?!

microsoft.public.exchange.misc

16 May 2006 1:42 PM

Stephen Walker

I have been performing a series of upgrades on my Exchange server over the
last few days, and I have seen some very odd behaviour from it.
The system is currently working, but only after I edited the registry to
make System Attendant depend on a service installed by Dell Openmanage.
While the system was down I spent some time searching for other people
having the same problem, but could not find anyone.
I am posting this to see if anyone has a better fix, and to maybe help some
other poor admin that gets in to the same situation.
I can see no reason why this dependency should occur, the pieces of software
are not related as far as I can see.

Here is what I started with:
Dell Poweredge 2650 server
Windows Server 2003
Exchange 2003 SP1
Dell Openmanage (CD version 3.7)
The server also has Powerchute and the Arcserve Exchange Agent installed,
but that is it. There is no local Antivirus on this server.
The system had been functioning faultlessly since July 2004 (this will teach
me to upgrade!).

The problem started off with Openmanage. I needed to upgrade to a Server
2003 SP1 compatible version. Installing the new version meant uninstalling
the old version first.
After the uninstall and reboot, Exchange did not come back up. Trying to
manually start System Attendant, it would start then immediately stop.

I installed Dell Openmanage 4.5, rebooted - problem solved!

Next step was Server 2003 SP1, no trouble there.

After that came Exchange 2003 SP2. The service pack seemed to apply fine,
but after a reboot Exchange did not come back up again. A second reboot did
not help.
The following error was appearing in the event log:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event Category: General
Event ID: 1005
Date: 15/05/2006
Time: 18:34:10
User: N/A
Computer: HERMES
Description:
Unexpected error The server is not operational. Facility: Win32 ID no:
8007203a Microsoft Exchange System Attendant occurred.

Looking back at the history, the same error was also appearing the first
time SA would not start, however this time when I tried manually starting
System Attendant, it worked!
I did some searching on the issue, and found a suggestion that the problem
might be related to spanning tree, but I do not have this enabled.
I did eventually find this: http://www.mcse.ms/message591771.html
The suggestion was that there was a race between DNS and System Attendant,
and that it be resolved by making SA depend on DNS. Trouble was, I didn't
have a service called "DNS" on this server. I tried "Dnscache", but no luck.
I then got in to looking at services that started after System Attendant had
failed, to see what else might cause a similar problem. The only ones I
could find - Dell Openmanage!
The main one of those seemed to be "Systems Management Event Manager"
(dcevt32). I added this to the DependOnService key for MSExchangeSA, and
Bingo! The Exchange services now work on startup.

So, my system is working (for now), but how on earth have I mananged to get
in to a situation where Microsoft Exchange depends on Dell Openmanage?!

Stephen