Configuring external web farm FQDN after you create pool

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Many enterprises set up their OCS environment initially without plans to connect it externally and later decide that they do want to make OCS available externally. The natural tendency is to re-run the setup and check the box for external access. However, this does not completely configure everything as it would if you had done this the first time. Most importantly, the external URLs for the web components server are not populated. You can verify this by opening hte OCS admin console and right clicking on the Web Components folder and go to Properties. You will see that the external URLs are missing. This will also manifest iteself when a Live Meeting client is trying to connect through an Edge Server and the connection fails. Upon this failure, open the PWCONSOLE-DEBUG log file that is generated in the %temp% directory. One thing you will want to look for is the following dialog:

FocusDataControl - Request Join Data MCU succeedd

Attempting to connect to the Data MCU

Missing or invalid property: serverURL

This missing or invalid serverURL is a flag that the client is unable to connect to the Web Component server because it doesn't have a URL. The most likely reason for hte URL missing is what I stated above. So, how do you fix this. It can be corrected two way: either by using WBEMTEST to manually enter the properties into WMI or by a LCSCMD command. Personally, I believe the LCSCMD command is much easier and quicker and you are less likely to make a mistake. So, that's the only one I'll talk about here. Here are the steps you need to take:

1. Log on to the Standard Edition server or Enterprise Edition server in the pool with an account that is a member of RTCUniversalServerAdmins group or has equivalent permissions.

2. Open a command-line prompt.

3. Navigate to the \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 directory.

4. To set the external URL for the Web farm, type the following command:

Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:<WebfarmFQDN> /poolname:<poolname>

Example:

Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:contoso.com /poolname:pool2