Who knew no MSMQ could kill OCS? Enough alliteration. If you don’t have MSMQ installed and you the April 2009 patches will fail to install correctly.
Thanks to Aaron Tienvisu for discovering the reason and posting it to his blog. According to Aaron, KB967381 causes the problem. If MSMQ is missing then it will attempt to revert the patch leaving you with a partial install of the QFE1 (April 2009) patches. This will cause the front end services not to start leaving you with a dead OCS environment.
MSMQ is pretty easy to install (and required if you’re using the Monitoring or Archiving server roles), however Aaron also posted a shortcut for getting things up and running
With Server 2008, you can run ServerManagerCmd -i MSMQ-Services and ServerManagerCmd -i MSMQ-Server.here.With Server 2003 x64, it is a little more complex as an automation task but can be done using the details mentioned
Thanks Aaron for digging this out quickly and saving the rest of us some trouble when patching!
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