Ghost Solution Suite

Hi,

We appear to be using Ghost Solution Suite (Console says version 11.0) and have some problems running it on a Windows 2003 box.

I have installed on Windows XP just fine and all the clients connect.

When the server is installed on our Windows 2003 machine, the clients say "Trying to Locate <server>"

I have done some digging, and it appears that the clients are attempting to access the server on port 1347. However on the Windows XP machine, ngserver.exe is listening on 1347. While the 2003 box seems to have store.exe listening on that port.

Store.exe appears to be part of Exchange which is installed on the Windows 2003 machine.

Is there anything else we can try apart from installing the software on another server that doesn't have exchange?

Thanks
Simon

Message Edited by sjdean on 07-17-200704:30 AM

Although I did plan for a mechanism for the server to advertise an alternative port to 1347 to the clients (when I wrote the first version around 1998) I don't recall ever having had to use it. Just yesterday I was discussing exactly this with our installer guy and I want to have alternate port usage supported (it would allow side-by-side installs of multiple GSS servers on the same machine, which would allow us to make the upgrade process more reliable) but I don't believe that all the plumbing in the code was ever wired up and tested in practice because we simply never had reports of conflicts.

So, off the top of my head I don't believe we have an effective mechanism for bumping 1347 somewhere else in GSS2. I'm hoping to have a defined process for that in future as part of some general work to improve the client/server connectivity, but that isn't going to help you right now.

From my reading of the Exchange docs there are only really two ports that Store.exe tries to use; one is the HTTP/RPC port which defaults to 6001, and the other is for MAPI - and by default it just picks a port number dynamically and then advertises it through its directory mechanisms. I believe you can control the MAPI port that store.exe uses for inbound connections rather than let it be dynamic, as described in this document in steps 6 and 7 and so one possibility might be to configure a fixed port assignment here for store.exe to use to nudge it away from 1347. However, I'm not really at all familiar with Exchange configuration so that's just a suggestion of something you can perhaps try.

Another possibility might be to rearrange some of the service dependencies so that the service configuration that loads store.exe runs after our service starts (so that it can't grab that port before we do). If store.exe really is just happening to be picking this port consistently from the dynamic pool, then starting our service first should resolve it too.