Monday, January 12, 2009

OCS 2007 R2 and Localization

For all of you European OCS 2007 R2 users, there’s a small “hidden feature” in the release of the OCS 2007 R2 Edge server.

During our migrations from OCS 2007 R1 to the all new R2 RTM release, we noticed some stange A/V Edge Auhentication server errors. Users would see a “limited calling” error in Communicator, the Mediation server would complain there was no valid A/V Authentication service, and the front-end A/V Validation would simply fail without any helpfull notification.  After some in-house troubleshooting, it was time to call in the troops.

Together with Microsoft, we validated the Edge configuration, did some tracing, and couldn’t find anything wrong with the edge server. One of the problems that kept coming up was a vague “Version MisMatch” error in the snooper logs. One of our troops at Microsoft took a closer look and noted that the edge server was complaining about a version 2,0 instead of a 2.0. Yes, you read that correctly, a comma instead of a period.

We never thought of the fact that we installed the servers with Dutch localization, and apparently, Microsoft didn’t either. One of the main differences when using a European localization, is the change in number notation. Where the US locale uses a notation like $ 1,000,000.00 , us Europeans will use  € 1.000.000,00 . This caused the Edge server to be unable to recognize any version numbers coming in.

This bug has been reported to Microsoft, and is in the process of being fixed. In the meantime, you can work around this issue in the following manner;

  • On the Edge server, add the Edge Service account to local administrators and logoff.
  • Logon using the Edge Service account
  • Go to control panel, Regional and Language options.
  • Change the format to English (US).
  • Remove the Service Account from the local administrators and reboot.

You can verify this workaround by rerunning the validation wizzard on your front-end. It will show the A/V authentication service pass with flying colours! Special thanks to Korneel who was giving me this information.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Korneel and Joachim, you're the bests !!!! I struggle with this problem for one week now and i was convinced that it was an OCS bug (glad to see i was correct :-) ). I posted on the OCS TAP newsgroup and get no answer at all and i was totally desperate. Please have a look at these posts if it can help others (posted by stro) as my error message was quite weird (Request Malformed).
You save my week. Thank you so much.
But to be honest, i wonder how can Microsoft do such common mistake....

Anonymous said...

More info on this : Edge is not the only service affected by this bug actually : CWA and RSG also suffer from this problem. The same solution apply and all rocks now !!!
I'm happy :-)

Rasmus Hald said...

Thanks for a great post. It gives the background info on this issue with OCS R2. I can confirm this problem is also present on systems running with Danish local for the service account. I've just finished a MS support case on this issue with almost the same resolution. I have posted it here:
http://it-proknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/03/office-communicator-limited-external.html
\Rasmus

Brahmam Lv said...

Kindly let me know if anybody have OCS R2 CBT

Simon Skotheimsvik said...

Thank you for posting this solution which solved my problem on OCS 2007 R2 Edge with Norwegian local.

Erik said...

Thank you for your post. After 3 reinstallations and excessive hairloss I managed to get A/V to work. If only I'd tried this 2 reinstallations ago..

Exarch said...

Incredible, a lot of thanks.

After many hours of work, i found this blog and all is working correctly...

Microsoft, Europe Exists.

Thanks Joachim