Jason Abrahamson

So as I said previously, I’m having, er, had, unless I’m speaking too soon, a heck of a time with LSA errors. Now you wouldn’t mind except a LSA error is not specific. It’s a generic “I can’t resolve my DC so I’m going to blow up” error. So I researched this error high and low. Every single white paper Microsoft has written on LSA error, and specifically this event ID (40960) reference domain controllers. Again, very helpful and informative, if this was a domain controller.

I spent weeks trying to figure this error out, replaced hardware, updates, uninstalled updates, everything. Eventually I cried uncle and decided to call Microsoft support. My boss gave me his credit card and I called the Microsoft customer service hot-line. You have three options, you can call and leave a message, email support, and phone support. The cost for phone is $260.00 The cost for email is $99.00. I opted for the phone support as this was getting more critical and my patience was wearing exceptionally thin. Going through the prompt I eventually got a live person on the line only to find out it was nothing more than some poor college girl who had no idea what half of this stuff was and only had one job responsibility: Take your money. As she read from the script and questionnaire it was evident that this was going to be painful and took nearly 15 minutes just to go through the process only to have her say “Ok, thank you for your purchase, we will contact you within two hours.”

As I grasped the phone with my sweaty palm I could not believe the words she uttered. I succumbed to the sheer shock of what I had just heard. Two hours? What? $260 to get a call in two hours? I was flummoxed.

My boss was shocked as I gently rested the headset on the receiver and said “they’re going to call me back.” He shook his head and murmured something about Microsoft under his breath as he left the room chuckling to himself.

At about the one hour and thirty minute mark a gentleman from Microsoft did call. I explained my issue to him and the other end of the phone was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. You could hear him flipping through pages of script trying to ask the next canned question that was picked by somebody in the communications department. Can you hear it? I did, it was my confidence in Microsoft support whooshing by as it left the building. As the time ticked by it was evident that this was going nowhere fast. As he searched through knowledge base articles asking me question that I already had asked myself I began working with my counterpart to remedy the situation.

What was common between the two servers? What was different? What had changed? What hadn’t changed? We essentially went back to the drawing board. Microsoft had me changing registry keys and killing applications like hummingbird in an effort to convince me that UDP on 389 was preventing TCP from talking to the global catalog server.

In the end we ended up fixing the problem without Microsoft. As I’m sure this will shock all of you, the only program that Microsoft didn’t point a finger at was the Windows Task Scheduler. See we run batch files and VBS scripts every minute to process files into this SQL server. Most require domain level authentication to run so we tested our theory by running the scripts as the local admin. Wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t get any LSA errors.

Solution? Use another Task Scheduler. That fixed our issue. So much for Microsoft tech support. Complete waste of $260.00