Exchange Server down after Patch Tuesday, RPC Endpoint mapper not listening on TCP port 135

Exchange 2003 SP2 server is down on a Windows Server 2003 Std Ed R2 SP2
after last night's round of updates. Anything that uses RPC fails with
messages in the event log "The endpoint cannot be created." Users cannot
connect to Exchange Server with Outlook. Can't manage DNS or DHCP, although
they are running and working.

These services are running:

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator

However, a check of "netstat -an" shows that the RPC endpoint mapper is only
listening on UDP, not on TCP (port 135). On my Vista machine, which has not
yet received the updates, the endpoint mapper is listening on both TCP and
UDP. Using portqry.exe, the endpoint mapper responds from the server itself
(only on UDP) with a little over 100 entries (nothing related to Exchange).
From my Vista machine, portqry to the server, port 135, protocol UDP,
produces "RPC query failed (6e4)."

I am using Routing and Remote Access's Basic Firewall (no NAT), and this is
a multihomed system, with WAN and LAN adapters. Most ports are blocked on
the WAN side but are wide open on the LAN side.

I have read these, but they just confirm that the RPC endpoint mapper isn't
work as expected:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839880/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310298

I'm about to uninstall all of the updates, then install each one again to
see what caused the problem.

Greg Stewart

 

FYI, I was able to fix this problem.

I had to uninstall all post-SP2 updates, then uninstall SP2. At that point,
the RPC endpoint mapper started working again. Then I reinstalled SP2,
tested RPC again, and then each post-SP2 update, testing each time.

All updates are applied, the RPC endpoint mapper is working, and the server
is back up for business. I suspect something got corrupted along the way,
but who knows what it was. The RPC endpoint mapper (rpcss) seems to be one
of those components that just works. In fact, if the service fails, Windows
is shut down automatically. The troubleshooting tips in the Microsoft KB are
pretty much limited to symptoms instead of cures.

Took about 14 hours total to get things running again.

Greg Stewart