Common Reasons for the OCS Services Not Starting

Many times I have had issues with starting the OCS services on a consolidated front-end starting (fortunately, this has been mostly confined to lab environments).  For the benefit of others, here are the 4 most common reasons for OCS service logon failures that I have experienced:

1. The OCS Service Logon Accounts Have Expired.
   • Event log errors 7000 and 1021 will typically appear if the passwords for the OCS accounts have expired as per the AD Default Domain Policy.
   • If the password for the default OCS service accounts (i.e. RTCService, RTCComponentService) is not correct, you will typically see an event log error 1609: “The service did not start due to a logon failure.”
   • The resolution is to open up Active Directory Users and Computers and set the Password Never Expires on RTCService, RTCComponentService (if that is suitable for your password policy).
2. The OCS Server Clock is Wrong.
   • This will cause a variety of Kerbos authentication errors – as seen in the event log.
3. All Domain Controllers are down in the AD Forest.
   • This can easily happen if your lab environment is like most lab environments and has one DC .
   • The event log will contain several errors – usually pertaining to basic Windows services – before the OCS services start to complain.
4. OCS 2007 R2 Services Hang After a Reboot on Windows Server 2008.
   • See Aaron Tiensivu excellent article on this issue: OCS 2007 R2 services hang at Starting on reboot with Server 2008 to see if it applies to you.

For reference, here are the names of the 5 major OCS 2007 R2 services on a consolidated front-end:

• Office Communications Server Front-End
• Office Communications Server IM Conferencing
• Office Communications Server Web Conferencing
• Office Communications Server Audio/Video Conferencing
• Office Communications Server Telephony Conferencing