The other day about 1/2 way into the day I get a call from a client saying “we haven’t received any emails all day”. I automatically go to the exchange server to look at the services. I noticed most of the exchange services were running. IIS and two Exchange services weren’t running however. What made this a bit tricky was all the client computers said that exchange was up and running. They just couldn’t send or receive emails.
The next thing I did was to go look in the Error Event Log on the server. When I went to open the MMC for the server manager it came back with the error: 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb. I tried a few other things that used MMC’s and almost all of them came back with that same error: 18ea3f92-d6aa–41d9-a205-2023400c8fbb.
After doing some searches most people gave up and redid their servers if they got this error. Some of the things they had suggested I tried. Still nothing.
I thought, I wonder if I remotely opened up the event viewer. I entered the server name.Voila! I could see all the errors.
After further inspections I found what seemed to be the error that started them all. It was Event 5173 – WAS. The error read:
- The Windows Process Activation Service encountered an error trying to read configuration data for config section ‘system.applicationHost/webLimits’ from file ‘\\?\C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\machine.config’, line number ‘146’. The error message is: ‘The configuration section ‘system.serviceModel’ cannot be read because it is missing a section declaration
‘. The data field contains the error number.
I went to that folder and opened the machine.config file. It’s an XML file that contains a bunch of configuration information about the machine for .net. When I saw that file I figured that there was going to be some crazy ASCII characters in it. Everything seemed to be fine.
According to this Microsoft KB the server supposedly backs up files in another location. Don’t even bother. No dice.
I did notice in the C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG folder that there was a machine.config.default file. It was from several years ago and it was 2kb smaller then the current file which was 22kb. I renamed the current machine.config file and called it machine.config.old and made a copy of the “default” file. I renamed it to machine.config.
I went into services and started World Wide Web service. It took a few seconds but it started! I then proceeded to go and start the rest of the services that should have auto started with the machine. They all started! I went and checked my Outlook client. The emails in the outbox had already left. Within about 20 minutes the mail was flowing again like it should have been.
Hopefully this helps anyone who had the same issues I had.
Indra says
Thanks! Was about to go in for a rebuild, till I found this! 🙂
Nico says
Thanks a lot! Worked like a charm, even on a W2k8 x86 machine. But for me the things that broke down were: server manager / event viewer (very annoying, makes it hard to troubleshoot) / task scheduler.
You’ve saved me a load of work by sharing this solution!
(I didn’t even had to restart the World Wide Web service, just closing and re-opening server manager seemed to do the trick for me)
Mustu says
Thanks dude. This worked out well for me!.
Douggiet says
Thanks, this worked for me as well!
Malman says
This is something I’ve had happen several times. Seems like each time the fix is something completely different. This time it happened on a freshly installed Server 2008 VM. After running all updates, the Server Manager snap-in simply wouldn’t work. I knew it wasn’t an issue with .NET 3.5 as has been the case in the past, so I wasn’t sure what to do… until I came to this blog post!
Thank you for writing this post, it worked perfectly!
Jorn says
Perfect!!!!! Worked for me
Mary says
Thanks! This not only fixed MMC but also SQL Server Manager Studio.
I had to replace the machine.config in two places:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG
and
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG
david g says
OMG….. Thank you so very much!
BillyG says
Thanks for the post this fixed my problem. However the problem seems to re-appear again after a month or so and the file goes from 20kb to 22kb?
Rufus says
Thanks.
Peter Efseaff says
Hey Jared, just wanted to add myself to the long list of thankful Windows users and to say that I had given up on trying to find a fix. Found a link back to you and in less than a minute all fixed. Thank you Jared. I now dub thee genius… Blessings to you..
Chris says
Great Job Jared. After many searches through Microsoft articles and much disappointment, I finally found your article. This fix took all of five minutes. Rockin and rollin without a hitch. Thanks!
none none says
Windows 2012 R2 I had to change the machine.conf in this directory:
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config