That was yet another waste of 3 hours of my life, thanks Microsoft for ruining my Sunday afternoon.
I don’t know about you, but I have to run a nasty Exchange 2007 set up in my company environment. Awhile ago I did some updates and not until today did I bother to reboot it. Upon doing so I found that the MS Exchange Service Host, File Distribution, Replication and Transport Service Search services failed to start back up.
After a Hell of a lot of looking about and realising I’ve already done the security certificate ignore by adding clr.microsoft.com 127.0.0.1 to my servers hosts file; I was well and truly stumped.
Everything looked right, I increased the start up times on the services to 60000 as suggested but to no avail, and it’s just these sodding services.
Turns out, you need to have .config files in the Exchange\Bin directory for all of the services now and to make sure that they start, they all need this magical directive:
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled=”false”/>
Not only that, the services that I needed to edit, some didn’t even have .config files.
The best source of advice I found was here: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Server_Software/Email_Servers/Exchange/Q_23823109.html (scroll to the bottom).