Exchange 2010 - 2013 random auth.owa error

Hello,

I have an odd situation where we are preparing 2 exchange 2013 servers to migrate 2010 servers to 

so currently:

2x Exchange 2010 (with dag)

2x Exchange 2013 (with dag).

Now it's behaving extremely odd when it comes to ECP for the 2013 servers.

randomly it works and doesn't work.

i generally try it from localhost on both 2013 servers, and individual server ip's from lets say 4 or 5 places.

all same login, and admin user is inside mailbox db DAG cluster.

now the problem:

it randomly pops up auth.owa error 500 

when i say random i truly mean random, sometimes everything 100% works, i am able to login 100% from all servers.

then i check back lets say 2 hours later.. some obtain auth.owa errors while others work.

What i tried:

- I rebuild OWA (first with reset, then with remove and re-add method) on both 2013 servers.

- removed killbit file from 2013's

- rebuild exchange 2013's (just exchange it self).

- checked heartbeat monitor boxes and removed the null values.

----------------------------------

It's safe to say i am kind of lost on what to try next. 

i am also mistefied why it randomly works, i know it's internally loadbalanced, but shutting down 1 of the 2013 servers did not get rid of this strange behavior.

is it possible that the exchange 2010 servers play a part in this issue?

Any ideas, any help is very much welcome!.

Regards,

March 27th, 2015 4:03am

Hello

please check eventlog on all 2013 exchange server and iis log for error.

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March 27th, 2015 2:31pm

Hi,

Please check whether the Microsoft Forms Based Authentication service is running on all Exchange servers. 

Similar thread for your reference: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/8cf6886f-a96f-44f1-88ee-bd3a42349fa9/owa-brings-up-logon-screen-but-after-login-gives-http-500-internal-server-error

Also check the authentication configuration on CAS.

Get-OwaVirtualDirectory -Server <server name> | fl *auth*

Set-OwaVirtualDirectory -Identity " server name \owa (Default Web Site)" -FormsAuthentication $true

 

Thanks

March 30th, 2015 1:11am

Hello,

To summ things up:

1) No it's not the forms auth service, they don't even exist in Exchange 2013's but only 2010 as far as i am aware.

2) Auth and websites where properly set, even removed, re-installed etc.

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- After some more investigation it seemed it had nothing to do with OWA but everything to do with ECP. (normal OWA login did work, while ECP failed).

- Exchange 2010 proxy worked fine too

In this case after re-installing Exchange 2013's as mentioned in the original post --> we did forget 1 thing: Update after re-install.

After doing all of the above.. updating exchange 2013's solved the issue.

a common solution for an odd problem :-)

Regards,

Marco

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April 8th, 2015 1:14am

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