First published on MSDN on Mar 17, 2008
I was helping a customer set up the document conversion service on their MOSS farm recently. We noticed the load balancer service would start fine on all the boxes in the farm, but the actual conversion service kept getting stuck in the starting state. It would eventually error out, but we couldn't figure out why. The ULS logs weren't much help. After closer examination, we realized the service would start correctly on the first box that ever loaded the service, but none of the other machines in the farm. After some digging, I found the following article:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/FX101633851033.aspx
It details steps as to how to fix this issue. They go as follows:
The Document Conversions Launcher Service Admin UI is not functional for any Launcher that will run on a server that is not hosting the Central Administration web application. The UI will never reflect current state in this configuration.
WORKAROUND:
To enable the Launcher Service you must specify the necessary Launcher information that the UI normally provides. This is done by updating two values in a registry key located on the machine on which you are trying to run the Launcher service. This includes the location of the Load Balancer and the Port to use for the connection.
Key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings]"LoadBalancerUrl"="http://server:port/HtmlTrLoadBalancer""Port"=dword:port
LoadBalancerUrl:
This is the full URL to the .NET Remoting channel that the Load Balancer opens. The scheme should be http://[please specify Load Balancer server]:[please specify Load Balancer port]/HtmlTrLoadBalancer and ensure they are accurate.
Port:
This is the port that the launcher service will open for incoming .NET Remoting requests to do Conversions, e.g. "8082".
After changing either of these settings (initially or if future machines are added and require settings changes), you must stop and start the Launcher service (Office Document Conversions Launcher Service) in the Services control panel (Start|Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Services). The services should be set to Enabled and set to start automatically (Automatic) if not so already.Any future changes to the Load Balancer settings will require updating the Launcher settings on each machine to reflect those changes. The services will also have to be stopped and then started again to pick up the new changes once updated.
