OWA broken on Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 – Red X appear instead of Web pages

By Nicolas BlankUncategorized

Installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 or 2008R2 is slightly different than installing on Server 2003. This includes installing Exchange 2007 SP3 on Windows 2008R2 since the pre-requisites that were taken for granted now need to be installed explicitly, especially concerning IIS.

I had an annoying issue on OWA, where instead of seeing the OWA pictures I would have expected, I saw red X’s. After perusing various avenues, including authentication, IIS config, etc, it boiled down to a simple missing prerequisite – the ability for IIS on Server 2008 to serve static content.

 

The build guy missed out the pre-requisite, so how to install is after the OS and Exchange are already installed? Quite simple actually -

  • Install the missing role
  • uninstall the CAS role via the GUI or the command line
  • reinstall the CAS role

 

In order to keep the post short, I’m posting the command lines versions only.

The command line to install the static Content Compression role is

ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression

 

Uninstall the CAS role via the GUI or the command line:

setup.com /mode:uninstall /role:c

Reboot the machine and re-install the CAS role via the GUI or the command line

setup.com /mode:install /role:c

OWA started working 🙂 Happy troubleshooting.