Interesting Queue Viewer issue on Edge Server

When you start Queue Viewer on an Edge Transport server you are NOT supposed to be able to pick another server to connect to. One reason, is that Edge Servers aren't generally meant to be domain joined, another reason is that the Queue Viewer RPC Server instance which EdgeTransport process starts for you only binds to LRPC (Local RPC) ports and are not accessible across the network.

So what happens if you start Queue Viewer, it doesn't try to connect to your local Edge Server instance and only allows you to select a Hub Transport Server (unsuccessfully I might add)? This was an issue I was pinged on earlier today.

Queue Viewer attempts to determine if it's on an Edge Server or not, and it does this by calling into some other classes that provide this information among other things. They will query the following key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Exchange\v8.0\EdgeTransportRole\ConfiguredVersion

This should be a string value with the properly installed Exchange version.

If this key is missing and without it's proper value then it will cause Queue Viewer to behave this way, even though Queue related management tasks from the powershell will function just fine.

Now, in my case we were at Exchange Server 2007 SP2 so the correct value was 8.2.176.2. Essentially, this should match the UnpackedVersion in the registry.

At this point we only seem to keep track of the major installed versions so rollups which are applied will not increment this value. One last word of caution. If this value is missing, you may have some other things going on because this value should be updated/added by a successful setup. In our case, everything on the server was working fine except queue viewer but it's still cause for investigation.