Exchange OAB will not Generate

Rachel N 66 Reputation points
2021-09-29T20:10:32.093+00:00

Hello all,

We are in the middle of an Exchange 2013 to a Exchange 2019 DAG on premise migration, and ran into an issue with desktop clients no longer updating their offline address books. We deleted the old one and ran the commands to create a new one on one of our new Exchange servers . . and it created it insofar as we can find it under the get-offlineaddress book but it never created a folder with a GUID under the ...\clientaccess\OAB directory and there isn't an OAB.xml for the clients to find.

We have tried rebooting the servers, recreating the OAB again (same issue), enabling web distribution, deleting and recreating the arbitration mailbox for OAB, running the new offline address book command on the other servers, adding authenticating users to the security on the OAB folder, changing the urls to server FDQN instead of our mail dns, and rebuilding the virtual directories. Everything looks like it works except it never generates the OAB files.

I have a ticket in with Microsoft but a month into the ticket and aside from them tweaking some config files (which broke IIS until undone), we are no closer to a resolution. Any ideas, tips, or similar experiences?

Thanks in advance!

Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server Management
Exchange Server: A family of Microsoft client/server messaging and collaboration software.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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  1. Rachel N 66 Reputation points
    2021-11-10T16:23:14.307+00:00

    I was working with Microsoft support on this again, and some progress was made but still in a pickle.

    We were able to generate an OAB with the below settings:
    RunspaceId : 66e3cffb-9859-4f77-bf7e-aec421ef763e
    Server :
    GeneratingMailbox : contoso.com/Users/SystemMailbox{bb558c35-97f1-4cb9-8ff7-d53741dc928c}
    AddressLists : {\Default Global Address List}
    Versions : {Version4}
    IsDefault : True
    PublicFolderDatabase :
    PublicFolderDistributionEnabled : False
    GlobalWebDistributionEnabled : True
    WebDistributionEnabled : True
    ShadowMailboxDistributionEnabled : False
    UseE14SortOrder : False
    UseE14SortOrderOrdinal : False
    UseOrdinalSortedMultivaluedProperties : True
    LastTouchedTime : 11/8/2021 2:06:46 PM
    LastRequestedTime :
    LastFailedTime :
    LastNumberOfRecords : 11454
    HttpHomeMdbLastProcessedBucket : 1000
    LastGeneratingData : MailboxGuid: 520e9906-c9c6-4870-8f53-fb3d352785b2; DatabaseGuid:
    9f34124b-0412-4d36-8878-96cbade3947e; Server: MailServer-2.contoso.com
    MaxBinaryPropertySize : 32768
    MaxMultivaluedBinaryPropertySize : 65536
    MaxStringPropertySize : 3400
    MaxMultivaluedStringPropertySize : 65536
    ConfiguredAttributes : {OfficeLocation, ANR, ProxyAddresses, ANR, PhoneticGivenName, ANR, GivenName,
    ANR, PhoneticSurname, ANR, Surname, ANR, Account, ANR, PhoneticDisplayName,
    ANR, DisplayName, ANR, ExternalDirectoryObjectId, Value, ExternalMemberCount,
    Value, TotalMemberCount, Value, ModerationEnabled, Value, MailboxGuid, Value,
    DelivContLength, Value, MailTipTranslations, Value...}
    DiffRetentionPeriod : 30
    Schcomle : {Sun.5:00 AM-Sun.5:15 AM, Mon.5:00 AM-Mon.5:15 AM, Tue.5:00 AM-Tue.5:15 AM,
    Wed.5:00 AM-Wed.5:15 AM, Thu.5:00 AM-Thu.5:15 AM, Fri.5:00 AM-Fri.5:15 AM,
    Sat.5:00 AM-Sat.5:15 AM}
    VirtualDirectories : {}
    AdminDisplayName :
    FullOabDownloadPreventionThreshold : 0
    ZipOabFilesBeforeUploading : False
    Identity : \Default Offline Address Book
    IsValid : True
    ExchangeVersion : 0.20 (15.0.0.0)
    Name : Default Offline Address Book
    DistinguishedName : CN=Default Offline Address Book,CN=Offline Address Lists,CN=Address Lists
    Container,CN=Contoso Ltd,CN=Microsoft
    Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=contoso,DC=com
    Guid : 04ca3c99-77a1-4afd-a0ef-e9f5af80d1ff
    ObjectCategory : contoso.com/Configuration/Schema/ms-Exch-OAB
    ObjectClass : {top, msExchOAB}
    WhenChanged : 11/8/2021 2:06:46 PM
    WhenCreated : 10/21/2021 11:41:01 AM
    WhenChangcomTC : 11/8/2021 8:06:46 PM
    WhenCreatcomTC : 10/21/2021 4:41:01 PM
    OrganizationId :
    Id : \Default Offline Address Book
    OriginatingServer : DomainController.contoso.com
    ObjectState : Unchanged

    The problem is now that we have it, it is not automatically updating, nor can it be manually updated consistently.
    If I run update-offlineaddressbook -identity "Default Offline Address Book" and restart the MSExchangeMailboxAssistants service, it will start a OAB gen log and download temp files but only gets to the line below and doesn't go further or update the actual OAB:
    2021-11-10T15:18:50.216Z,DebugTrace,3934afa6-0233-446d-afd8-a4dd14289be2,04ca3c99-77a1-4afd-a0ef-e9f5af80d1ff,OABGeneratorAssistant.ProcessAssistantStep: Completed 'GenerateOrLinkTemplateFiles'. Next step set to 'BeginGeneratingAddressListFiles'.

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  2. Rachel N 66 Reputation points
    2022-02-09T20:06:50.317+00:00

    We resolved this issue by making a new database with a copy on each member of our DAG, and them moving ALL arbitration mailboxes to the new Database. After that everything works normally.

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