Event ID 7009: Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Microsoft Exchange Service Host service to connect

After the installation of Exchange 2007 SP1 rollup 4, the Microsoft Exchange Service Host service and the Microsoft Exchange File Distribution service may fail to start.
The following events will be present in your EventLog (System):

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7009
Date:  10/27/2008
Time:  8:15:34 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: mailserver1
Description:
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Microsoft Exchange Service Host service to connect.
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Microsoft Exchange File Distribution service to connect.

and:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date:  10/27/2008
Time:  8:15:34 AM
User:  N/A
Computer: mailserver1
Description:
The Microsoft Exchange Service Host service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

The cause of these error events is the lack of internet access. It seems that both services try to download a revoked certificate list from http://crl.microsoft.com, and time out if they don’t have access to this.
There are a couple of options to solve this problem:

  1. If you have a proxy server, you may have to set the correct proxy settings. Use ProxyCfg.exe to set the IP address and port.
  2. If you have a firewall, Internet traffic may be blocked by it. In that case, open HTTP traffic from the server to the internet
  3. If you have installed .NET Framework 2.0 only, you may need a hotfix for .NET Framework 2. Microsoft has a KB article which describes the same problem, and from where you can request a hotfix: Exchange 2007 managed code services do not start after you install an update rollup for Exchange 2007

Because there’s generally no real security issue, I would recommend trying step 1 and 2 first, before installing the hotfix.

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Winston Ugaz

The option 1 works for me. Thanks a lot.

Markus Mannheim

Thanks for this information.
In my case Exch services were stopped regularythrough a batch and did not start anymore. After 1.5 hours of investigating, your post helped me getting Exch2007 working again.
It’s a shame the no exact informations are logged in Eventlog when the host crl.microsoft.com cannot be contacted……

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