Hi All,
I've just up/back/side/graded from WHS v1 to WHS 2011 which did not go as smoothly as I expected and now that I've spent days solving all the problems thought I'd share my experiences in case it helps someone else out.
First problem, WHS Connector launchpad showing server down, as did lights-out on one machine only (Lenovo W520 laptop) Remainging 3 other machines all ok. Client's event log showed .net tcp sharing service timing out and shutting down. This service is a dependency of quite a few things but mostly all the 'Windows Server' based services. Manually starting the processes would allow launchpad to see the server status but it never survived a reboot.
The event log ID & error is "Event 7009, Service Control Manager
A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service service to connect."
After a LOT of headscratcing & trial & error, I eventually discovered this was caused by Lenovo's 'Rapidboot shield' program (which was actually causing slow login problems too) This program has been withdrawn by Lenovo and my experience suggests it should be at worst disabled, at best removed entirely. According to the documentation it's designed to make sure all the important services start first and delays the 'unimportant'. Unimportant in this case included the .net.tcp sharing service.
Next headscratching problem: 2 out of the 4 machines wouldn't shutdown or sleep after a lights-out backup, even though 'force action' was enabled.
A check of the lightsout client service log, found in C:\ProgramData\LightsOut & comparing to working systems revealed the following error:
2013-01-11 21:28:46:108 [ 4] ERROR **** Can't open event log: backup detection not working! ****
So what event log was it looking for? Looking back at the event viewer I found that the Windows Server event log under 'Applications and Services Logs' was missing on the non-working machines and that the event log itself was based on something called 'WSSG'.
I investigated where the event logs are configured and found they are defined in the registry. As a hack workaround I thought I'd try copying the config registry keys from a working system to a non-working one and when 'regedit' wouldn't let me discovered that there were some strange permissions on the event subkeys in the registry.
Check the permissions of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\eventlog are:
Authenticated Users - Read
SYSTEM - Full Control & Read
Administrators - Full Control & Read
Apply to this key and all subkeys.
I then un-installed & re-installed the WHS Connector software, rebooted, the missing WSSG Windows Server event log had been created, and now lights-out was performing suspends/shutdowns after backups correctly.
It took me DAYS to work all this out, so hopefully this will save someone a bit of pain in the future!