After installing CU6 on the exchange 2013 mailbox server we keep getting the below event error message

Log Name:      Application
Source:        MSExchange Common
Date:          10/2/2014 1:06:25 PM
Event ID:      4999
Task Category: General
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:     
Description:
Watson report about to be sent for process id: 30632, with parameters: E12, c-RTL-AMD64, 15.00.0995.029, M.E.RpcClientAccess.Service, M.E.Data.ApplicationLogic, M.E.D.A.U.HttpPhotoRequestBuilder.Build, System.NotSupportedException, 4e29, 15.00.0995.027.
ErrorReportingEnabled: True

Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="">
  <System>
    <Provider Name="MSExchange Common" />
    <EventID Qualifiers="16388">4999</EventID>
    <Level>2</Level>
    <Task>1</Task>
    <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
    <TimeCreated SystemTime="2014-10-02T20:06:25.000000000Z" />
    <EventRecordID>7826297</EventRecordID>
    <Channel>Application</Channel>
    <Computer></Computer>
    <Security />
  </System>
  <EventData>
    <Data>30632</Data>
    <Data>E12</Data>
    <Data>c-RTL-AMD64</Data>
    <Data>15.00.0995.029</Data>
    <Data>M.E.RpcClientAccess.Service</Data>
    <Data>M.E.Data.ApplicationLogic</Data>
    <Data>M.E.D.A.U.HttpPhotoRequestBuilder.Build</Data>
    <Data>System.NotSupportedException</Data>
    <Data>4e29</Data>
    <Data>15.00.0995.027</Data>
    <Data>True</Data>
    <Data>False</Data>
    <Data>Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.Service</Data>
    <Data>
    </Data>
  </EventData>
</Event>

Services seem to be fine but i do have a group of users that complain that their outlook 2013 email clients will go non-responsive a few times a days. Wondering if this is related. Also this error is appearing every few minutes. Anyone else experiencing this?

Hi,

Based on my knowledge, unless the 4999 event causes service crash frequently, it will not affect client connectivity.

Please check if there is any other related events in the application log.

And make sure the Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access service is running well.

Best regards,

I do not see any other events being logged in the event viewer. The process ID referenced in the event, points to the Microsoft.Exchange.RPCClientAccess.Service.exe. This is why I'm thinking this might be the reason some users have connectivity issues. We are using a DAG configuration and the passive servers due not generate this error, until I activate a database on the passive server, then the 4999 error appears. We also have another DAG for our students and those servers are not generating the 4999 error and we are not receiving any complaints.  

Hi,

From your description, this issue appears after you active a passive database copy on passive server.

If that is the case, please re-active the database copy on active server to check if this problem persists.

And please restart the Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access service to check if it works.

Besides, please use the following commands to check DAG health.

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus

Test-ReplicationHealth

Best regards,

Hi,

I would like to add some information to this, in case others are facing the same circumstance. I too received the same errors on my Exchange 2013 CU5 and CU6 servers mentioned above. I ended up calling Microsoft Premiere support because there was a very large impact in our environment as we had Outlook 2010 clients that were having Exchange 2013 connectivity issues. Long story short, since Outlook 2010 was trying to use RPC to connect to the Exchange 2013 servers and in the Event Viewer we were seeing the 4999 Event ID multiple times per minute, RPC was crashing on the Exchange servers resulting in client connectivity issues.

Microsoft ran a ProcDump on the PID for RPC crash and basically came back with nothing only saying that it was a result of someone uploading a picture via Lync that was either corrupt or too large cause the photo store to crash the RPC Service. They also were firm in saying that this should have no impact. I was not convinced because this happened after installing CU5 and the client connectivity issues also appeared in conjunction with these 4999 RPC errors. In my mind that is a bug and I asked that something be published to address this as it seems silly that one user uploading a Lync profile picture could cripple our environment.

You would need to navigate to the following location to see this Photo Store. (D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\ClientAccess\photos) Change the path to point to your local Exchange install instance. Most of the files in my location are 0K but there are a few that are 4K so it seems they are not large enough to affect anything. We have 4 CAS+MBX servers so I looked at all 4 servers.

What I ended up doing to resolve the 4999 event ID which actually ended up fixing my client connectivity issues also was to edit the following file. "D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Bin\Microsoft.Exchange.RpcClientAccess.Service.exe.config"

Back the above file up and when you open it scroll about 3/4 to 7/8 of the way down and find the following lines:

    <!-- Enables retrieval of the HD photo in DOMT. -->
    <add key="HDPhotoEnabled" value="true" />

Set the line to "false" like so:

    <!-- Enables retrieval of the HD photo in DOMT. -->
    <add key="HDPhotoEnabled" value="false" />

Then restart the Microsoft Exchange RPC Client Access service and refresh the Event Viewer and the 4999 errors should stop and client connectivity should be restored.

I noticed this error with CU5 and then subsequently after I installed CU6, so I had to perform this change after I installed CU6 and probably do the same once CU7 comes out. I do not know the adverse effects of making this change as Microsoft really could not explain more than what I wrote above, but I had to get Outlook connectivity restored and this was my only option. It appears that Lync 2010 photos and Outlook 2010 photos stayed intact so no users were complaining that their self-uploaded profile pictures were gone. We never had this problem with Outlook 2013 SP1 as we have MAPI enabled and the crashing RPC service would not have effected those clients. OWA was also working just fine.

Hopefully Microsoft can offer me more of an explanation as I ended up fixing my own issue but I raised concern with how this happened. I hope this helps someone else as it helped me.

Thanks.

Alan

• Proposed as answer by The Brian W. Smith 19 hours 37 minutes ago
• Marked as answer by Andy DavidMVP, Moderator 19 hours 34 minutes ago

Thank you for your reply. I will definitely look into implementing your work around. I had a feeling it might have something to do with photos, since the error indicated a service called photo request builder. I'll look into implementing this work around in the next few days and let you know how it goes.

Alan, your fix worked for me.  I'm on CU7 and could not figure out what was going on.  This is the only reference I have found for this fix.

Thank you!!!!