remote Outlook not connecting with HTTPS over RPC

As a result of the screwing around I did with IIS yesterday, I seemed to have broken the ability of remote clients to connect via outlook.

This was fixed by looking at the RPC virtual dir in IIS. The security no longer had "Integrated Windows Authentication" enabled. Toggling this fixed the issue.

To confirm, before I toggled this, I tried the clients with basic auth (which was enabled on IIS) and that did work. Then, to be more secure, I disabled basic and enabled Integrated on IIS, and reset the clients to use Integrated.

All is good again...

OWA 440 Login Timeout

So I thought I was clear last night. I wasn't. This morning the server wouldn't let anyone log on, and no one could access the website, no one could access OWA. OWA reported "440 Login Timeout". website prompted for user/pass.

There are lots of people with the problem 440 login timeout, but none of the posted solutions worked for me. Eventually, after looking at the Event viewer security log, after I had enabled logon/logoff success/failure auditing, I came to this kb article. Error 5 was the case I was looking at. My server is a SBS2003, so I figured the second part shouldn't matter, but I checked it anyway. The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\CrashOnAuditFail was set to 2. I changed it to 0, and rebooted. Like magic, all problems went away.

I did a search on CrashOnAuditFail, and it turns out that if it has a value of 2, only administrators are allowed to log on. Exactly what I was seeing. I have no idea how it got set to 2... Here is the link that describes the CrashOnAuditFail settings

SBS Server 2003 DNS failure (kinda)

Got a call to work on a server. When I started looking, the MMC snap-in wouldn't connect to the DNS server, yet the DNS server service was running, error on dns anap-in: "cannot contact the dns server". dcdiag immediately gave me an error LDAP 58. I couldn't look at anything AD related.

Eventually I read this post:

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/windowsserverdns/nov2005/post25141946.asp

which led me to:

KB 832981 - CrashOnAuditFail

Which doesn't sound related, but I followed the instructions and it worked. Now it is possible that I somehow fixed it another way but who knows, as the last step in the KB article was to reboot...

Anyway hopefully this will help someone... (and me next time)