I ran into a strange error recently
on an Sccm 2012 server. The WWW Publishing Service was stopped. When I tried to
start the service it failed on a dependency. A quick check revealed the Windows
Process Activation Service (WAS) was stopped. When I tried to start WAS I
received the following error.
Windows could not
start the Windows Process Activation Service service on Local Computer. Error
13: The data is invalid.
The Event Viewer was littered
with equally cryptic Event IDs, such as WAS 5005 and WAS 5036.
Not
the first time
I’ve actually encountered an error
like this before. I am not sure what causes it. But evidently something in
Internet Information Services (IIS) becomes corrupt.
The applicationHost.config
file was messed up. For me the file was completely empty. Not a line of code to
be found.
Luckily IIS takes backups that can
be found in C:\INETPUB\HISTORY. Under here you will see several
folders with a prefix of CFGHISTORY. The folder with the highest
revision number will be your latest backup. Copy this file and overwrite the
existing file at C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\INETSRV\CONFIG.
Once the file has been replaced
start the WAS service.
If WAS starts successfully then
you should be able to start the WWW Publishing Service. If that starts
successfully, then you can restore all Exchange Web Services.
