Live Communication Server

Live Communicator 2005 fails to install – fixed

I had a client’s LiveCommunicator 2005 stop working and part of the troubleshooting was to remove the software and reinstall. Unfortunately, when I went to reinstall the software, the installation was interrupted and did not complete. No errors were logged in the event log but by looking at the install log file and searching for “return value 3” (standard practise when debugging msi installs) I found the following “ActivateTimeBomb. Return value 3”.  A google  search only pulled back 3 results, all for Live Communicator which was a good  sign, but I did find a posting on the appdeploy forums that offered a solution.  I had already applied this patch to the server but had not needed to apply it to the client before, but doing so fixed the problem. The patch file can be found from the kb article 974571 or a direct download.

I was suprised to see how little information was available on google and how useless the install process was. The timebomb information was hidden away in the install log and  knowing that “Return Value 3” was the key to a successful troubleshooting session.

Live Communication Server password expiry

Somehow when I installed LCS I had not set the account to not expire so I was getting warnings in the eventvwr that the password was about to expire. Last week I set the service account to not have the password expire and I thought that was the end of it. However today I checked the eventvwr and found that I was getting eventid 12295 which is because the password is set to not expire. KB Article 830534 incorrectly (imho) states that this is due to the default domain policy or other group policy. This is only partially correct as it also occurs if you override the maximum age domain policy and select “password does not expire”

Google chat in gmail

You can now chat from within the gmail interface (so no need to open another program) – or at least you can if your contacts also have had this feature enabled in their gmail account. My first gmail account has had this option enabled but my main google account that I use on a day to day basis (as it contains all helsby.net emails) does not have it activated yet. The strange thing is that you can initiate a chat invite from a working account (and I was hoping that would activate my secondary account for chatting) but the secondary account does not receive the invite in the mail box – I’m guessing it probably goes to the chat client – if it has been downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. At the moment I’m guessing it is text only IM similar to the web interfaces to MSN and ICQ.
In related news I’ve been setting up a Live Communication Server for a client and the Communicator program looks pretty good. The annoying thing is that I can’t see any documentation on how to get hold of the non-trial version of the client – it apparently is free with licences for the server so you would expect to get the media for the client with the server – but nooooooo…….