LCS 2005 SE backup and restore WMI error and event 30961

First reported by Fairfax county the backup and restore procedure in the LCS 2005 Deploy SE document leaves you in a state of which clients cannot log in and the Admin can not view the Allow and Block List:

Problem behavior:

After restoring the following behavior and errors will be noted:

In the LCS2005 MMC get properties for a user and click on the "Allow and Block List"  "View/Edit" button the get the following error.
MMC snap-in failed to read one or more propery from WMI. If this is a new user then it may not have been picked up the User Replicator yet. Please try again a few moments later.

In the event log they receive the following every 10 minutes.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Live Communications User Services
Event Category: (1006)
Event ID: 30961
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Failed to connect to backend database. Live Communications Server will continuously attempt to reconnect to the backend. While this condition persists, incoming messages will receive error responses.
Backend Server: (local)\rtc Database: rtc Connection string of:
driver={SQLServer};Trusted_Connection=yes;AutoTranslate=no;server=(local)\rtc;database=rtc;network=dbmslpcn;
Cause: Possible issues with backend database.

Resolution:
Ensure the backend is functioning correctly.

Cause:

The cause for this problem is that the Service Account has not been granted the serveracct role for the restored database. It is assumed that after restoring the database you could rerun setup but the solution is to reapply the serveracct role to the database.

Resolution:

On the LCS server with the LCS CD at a command prompt:

dbsetup.wsf /setsecurity /serveracct:domain\user

More Information:

I retitled the blog to hopefully help with identifying this particular issue quicker.

There was a lot of work behind the scenes on this. Given my access to tools not yet public I used LCSTracer from the 2005 Resource Kit (not released as of this post). The output is not readable but something to be given to PSS for us to convert. In this case we traced on LcsWMI and UserServices. With the output I was able to see the WMI query syntax and used WBEMTEST (included on Windows 2003) to attempt this same query with a different user context. All of this pointed to permissions problems. In the process I was able to speak with 1 product group member and she in turn looped in another who connected to my boxes and fixed it.

I realize I have just talked over some tools and procedures without a lot of detail but I will reserve those for other posts. Hopefully this will result in very specific posts with only one subject.

Toml LCS Kid