Surface Hubs not Pingable / Not pulling meetings or accounts from GAL

[Joshua Martin]

Hey all,

A couple of issues that have popped up for us the during the last week. We got reports that 3 of our Hubs are showing the following issues:

• Scheduled meetings are not showing on the Welcome screen.
• When a user goes to log into OneDrive, it no longer begins to auto-populate accounts as you type. Same happens when adding people to the 'To' field when sharing a whiteboard from email.
• Emailing from the Whiteboard does not work. There's no error, but email is never received.

I discovered that the Hubs cannot be pinged (not sure if this is by design or a sign of the issue). Our network team tried pinging directly from the vlan and switch they were connected and could not ping it that way either. Our server team says they don't see anything wrong with the account, but it's unusual for 3 Hubs top start exhibiting the same symptoms.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Josh

My testing says that Surface Hubs don't respond to ping requests (although our internal DNS does resolve the device name to the IP correctly). So pinging to determine network status is a no go.

All of the symptoms you've described would be for one of the two following reasons:

- Either the device account is locked/password expired
- The Surface Hub has no internet access

So, firstly check the device account in AD (or AAD if online) and ensure that the password hasn't expired, and the account isn't locked. If you have a policy to expire passwords after a set number of days, remember to enable the setting to allow the Surface Hub to rotate the password automatically.

Regarding internet access, you can check the general status under Settings > Network & Internet. Assuming you're plugged into ethernet, it'll show as Connected if the Surface Hub believes it has internet access. You can easily test this by going to Edge and just trying to access a webpage.

If you have a proxy server, also check your proxy settings on the Surface Hub and authentication methods to make sure it can access the internet successfully.

If all that fails, I'd double check your firewall port/IP range permissions to make sure nothing is being blocked that the Surface Hub needs. You can find more information on these ranges here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/surface-hub/prepare-your-environment-for-surface-hub

Thanks
D

[#3]

Almost forgot to mention, consider setting up Microsoft OMS for monitoring your Surface Hubs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/surface-hub/monitor-surface-hub

We use it purely for device heartbeat which gets sent every minute (or every hour when hibernating) so we can see if any have been turned off or if any have network issues when turned on. It's free if you only need it for basic purposes!

[#4]

Thanks for the reply, Daniel.

I've gone through all that - the Account is fine (no issues if I log in with it at the portal and it shows up to date on the Hub).

I had no issues browsing out to the internet in Edge. I spoke with our network team and they don't see anything off on their end.

One thing I have noticed is that the Hub has meetings showing up that were scheduled prior to the issue, however, all new events don't show up. 

On a side note, I'll have to look at OMS and using it as a basic monitor as you stated you do - appreciate the advice.

[#5]

Hmm, if old ones are there but new ones aren't, and there's nothing else wrong, maybe it could be that invite auto0accept has somehow been disabled on the device account mailbox?

There's an account verification powershell script you can run which can check a few things out. You'll find it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/surface-hub/appendix-a-powershell-scripts-for-surface-hub#acct-veri...

This is the powershell for auto-accepting invites (where $strRoomUpn is the UPN of the device account): Set-CalendarProcessing $strRoomUpn -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept

Only other time I've seen this kind of issue was because we forgot to put on an auto-delete rule on our mailbox and it was filled up by people sending whiteboards! As soon as it hit our limit the account stopped accepting invites as it couldn't send responses.

[#6]

Joshua,

In addition to Daniel's input, you can also check the Sync status of the account under Settings - Surface Hub - Accounts - Sync Status. 

Also, you can try to reconfigure the account as that will probably pop an error. 

Did you enable Conditional Access or MFA recently? You can also check from a non-domain joined laptop and configure the account in the Windows 10 Mail app which is the same client used on the Surface Hub to sync the calendar (make note it only uses ActiveSync).

If you still need help, open a ticket with Support and provide a set of logs

In regards to the PING issue, ICMP is disabled by Windows Defender. You can test this by disabling it and try to ping but I don't recommend this.

As a workaround, you can try to telnet instead on port 7250 which is the InfraCast port, given that this is not blocked by the network.

Thanks,

Cezar