In November last year Microsoft patches where applied to our domino server (8.5FP1 64 bit on windows 64 bit).
Since then any scheduled agent that uses Excel (32 bit) get’s a 208 error: cannot create automation object. Same problem for an agent that uses MS Access.
We restarted the server, the agent will run through scheduler with no issues for about a day, but then stops working again. This happens each time the server is restarted.
When it stops working, if you run the agent using “tell amgr run” command through server console it works, also if you run it through the designer on the server.
We have tried various things like un-installing MS Office and reinstalling, configuring DCOM to explicitly allowing the domino server to access the Excel application (we don’t run Domino server as a service as it needs access to network drives, so we login the box under a user account with admin access, so they server runs under the admin user account).
As a work around we are running the agents on our failover server (clustered) that doesn’t have this issue. It didn’t have the security patches installed in November as it didn’t have SP2 installed for MSOffice.
This is why we tried reinstalling MSOffice on the orginal server to try and match the exact state for both servers (security and patch updates), but did not have any luck. We also tried copying the excel.exe file from the failover server.
I have searched on the net in blogs and forums and can’t find anyone having the same problems.
basic time line of events:
November - security patches installed on server, issues started very next day
restarted server, was fine for about a day
removed MSOffice patches and restarted server
installed MSOutlook 2007 in case of DDE issue
Copied EXCEL.EXE form working server to non-working server
reinstalled MSOffice with all patches minus ones from November, restarted server
removed MSOffice and installed same version as per working server
changed DCOM to explicity give access to user account the domino server runs under to the MSOffice applications
posted probelm to LN forum
Has anyone else had a similar issue, or can point me in the right direction to look?
What runtime security level is your agent running under? You may need to escalate its privilege to either run restricted operations or to run restricted operations with full administration privileges. By default, Domino agents are not set to run restricted operations.
We run all our agents on runtime security level 3 - full admin rights. Also the user account we have the server logged on with is in the administrator group for the server, so it has full rights at that level as well.
We also tried disabling the Virus protection on the server and didn’t help either.
We have no fix for the problem, but as a work-around we are using the seperate agent that does a run-as on the original agent, Excel then works.
Once we had this work-around in place, we installed all the required security patches on the other clustered server to ensure both servers were consistent.
Interestingly it did not have the same problem with Excel afterwards.
Maybe this is a version of the problem we experienced - search the internet for this advice :
For Windows 2008 Server x64: Make this folder.
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop
YMMV. Microsoft says server-side automation of Excel is “not supported”, and, “consider re-architecting your application”. (Translation: Delete all, start drawing new flowcharts - it’s the Windows way!)
I have had numerous issues with OLE objects after apply MS Office patches to the server. When I uninstall the MS Office patches, the problems go away. By patches I mean anything related to Office, including any Excel patches and Word patches.