Office Web Apps Server (OWA) is a new Office server product that delivers browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. A single Office Web Apps Server farm can support users who access Office files through SharePoint 2013, Lync Server 2013, Exchange Server 2013, shared folders, and websites. The new stand-alone deployment model means that you can manage updates to your Office Web Apps Server farm independently of other Office Server products that are deployed in your organization.
Today I am here to share a simple issue which could have roots connected to different components in your environment. Below is the generic error which my users to face.
Initially I started looking though all my OWA Application server logs (standard windows application and other logs), then started digging through my OWA ULS logs location (C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\OfficeWebApps\Data\Logs\ULS).
In the meantime I found that even my search had issues. You need do a complete full crawl for the OWA to render the office documents in the browser. Though my environment was stable for quiet sometime now, I was still not convinced that my search errors was a leading cause for the OWA.
Caution : Some errors might be misleading at times and if your environment was stable enough for a while DO NOT go about drastic measures like recreating search application or re configuring OWA etc.Finding the root cause will help us in the long run instead of getting to workarounds.
I broke my head all around again and trying to fix the search issues which had like 200K errors (OMG, that unacceptable...!!!). And all of a sudden my search started working fine and after like 7hours and luckily even the OWA was working PERFECT by 11:30pm midnight.I was a happy SharePoint Admin and sent email to my boss to verify early in the morning.
The very next day my boss called up and informed the issue still persists.So the search for the issue is ON again.
When I logged in early morning my Laptop was showing 8:50am but on the server it was 8:58am. Forgot to mention my servers and users domain are totally different. This pointed me to another clue to check the timings on my servers and I started running a few commands and was shocked to see the inconsistent timings on the servers.
By Default all servers in a domain get the time synced from the domain controller.But in my case that was not happening. The reason was because all my servers were virtual and hosted on different Host machines (HyperV Hosts). There is setting on HyperV which forces the guests to get the timing of the Host. Below is the setting.
Option one is find out the cause of the Host machine sync issue with the Domain.
Second option is uncheck this option on the Hyper-V for the specific server then do a sync to Domain server from the specific server either using GPupdate or set time option. I will not go into the specific details here.
Once you fix the timings of all the servers in the farm the OWA should be working as per normal. In case the problem still persists do a full crawl again.
This was one of the environmental issue which has bugged me for almost 8 hours. Since I am a SharePoint Admin I always think only from SharePoint perspective. But sometimes you might need to think at a bigger picture and from different angels to get to the root cause.
** Wish you a happy SharePoint/OWA troubleshooting ***
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