Archive | May 2016

MS Operations Management: Error 2013 Unable to register to Advisor Service

I was recently working with a customer to integrate Microsoft Operations Management Suite into their SCOM environment and noted they received the following error when connecting SCOM to MOMS:

Error 2013: Unable to register to Advisor Service.  Please contact the system administrator.

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Thankfully this is a relatively simple fix.  While they had upgraded their SCOM environment to the latest patch (UR9 at the time of this post), they had not imported the updated Management Packs (C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Operations Manager\Server\Management Packs for Update Rollups) as part of the upgrade process.  These Management Packs include the update to the old Advisor Server – now known as “Operations Management Suite.”  Simply adding the new MP’s resolves the issue:

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Azure Recovery Services “Invalid Vault Credentials”

I was recently setting up Azure Recovery Services for a customer and was struggling to install the Azure Vault Credentials during the “Register Server” step.  Each time I would install I received the following error message:

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Invalid vault credentials provided. The file is either corrupted or does not have the latest credentials associated with recovery service. (ID: 34513)
We recommend you download a new vault credentials file from the portal and use it within 2 days.

I reviewed the Azure Recovery Services logs (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent\Temp) and found some mostly generic .NET errors about being unable to communicate with the server.  I attempted to connect via the Azure Backup PowerShell cmdlets which returned the following error:

Login-AzureRmAccount : The browser based authentication dialog failed to complete. Reason: The request could not be processed by the server due to invalid syntax.

On a bit of a hunch, I looked into the Security Providers settings for the server to see if any client protocols and been adjusted and noticed that they had all been hardened and a lot of ciphers client ciphers were disabled beyond the defaults.
Path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols

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I compared these settings against another server and then removed all of the additional entries back to the defaults (after backing up the changes):

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After that my Azure PowerShell connection worked perfectly:

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From there I had to remove all of the old machine certificates added through all of the failed attempts…

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Finally a re-install of the agent and a re-register of the server completed successfully.

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