In my Exchange Admin practices I frequently come across peculiar problems. Probably this is only of the excitements the work can give:)
Back to the interesting problem I encountered -
it was that OAB did not get updated to reflect recent changes made on user’s end. Not a big deal you say as OAB problems are not rare indeed. The blog of OAB guru may prove this standpoint easily.
Manual update on the server completed successfully but it did not help when Outlook was engaged into play – still no changes visible. Sporadically I received infamous 4010F error, strangely it hit me not on every workstation I used to test.
Given that, the app log was of an essence. And it revealed a portion of helpful data -
Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event Category: OAL Generator
Event ID: 9334
Date: X/XX/2010
Time: 10:30:49 AM
User: N/A
Computer: COMPUTER
Description:
OALGen encountered error ffffffff while initializing the offline address list generation process. No offline address lists have been
generated. Please check the event log for more information.
- /o=XXX/cn=addrlists/cn=oabs/cn=user
This fffff error is frequently caused by some misconfiguration regarding OAB regeneration on the server. A little bit of research helped diagnose a problematic system path written in the registry.
In the particular case the path to OabDropFolderLocation was incorrect -
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeSA\Parameters\COMPUTER\OabDropFolderLocation pointed to a non-existent hard drive. It must point to a valid location like <disk:>\exchsrvr where <disk:> reflects real physical location of this folder I changed it to the one that was correct for given server, regenerated OAB and voila – the issue was gone.
And yes, before making a registry change like that please be extra careful as any registry modifications may be a lethal blow for your server if performed without proper care.
