Support Tip: ConfigMgr 2012 Management Point fails with a 500 error after working fine for a short period of time

~ Muhammad Adil | Senior Consult-Escalation Engineer

Hi Everyone, hope you all are doing well! I’m writing this post regarding a recent case that was escalated to me. During my research and troubleshooting, I found a few people who were mentioning the same issue on the TechNet forum but without any resolution so I thought to write this in an effort to help anyone else who might come across the same issue.

With this issue, a System center 2012 Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr 2012) Management Point (MP) had been reinstalled several times, as was IIS as well, but still the Management Point fails after working fine for a short span of time and logs the following error in mpcontrol.log:

Call to HttpSendRequestSync failed for port 80 with status code 500, text: Internal Server Error SMS_MP_CONTROL_MANAGER

Http test request failed, status code is 500, 'Internal Server Error'. SMS_MP_CONTROL_MANAGER 5/23/2013 2:33:47 PM 584 (0x0248) STATMSG: ID=5436 SEV=E LEV=M SOURCE="SMS Server" COMP="SMS_MP_CONTROL_MANAGER

Since IIS had already been reinstalled and no AV was running on the machine, the next thing I suspected was that some Group Policy might be causing the issue. We reinstalled the MP and it showed 200 OK in mpcontrol.log. Then we ran the command gpupdate /force, and the moment we did that the MP generated our 500 error, thus I was assured that there is some GPO causing this issue

On the site server we ran the command gpresult >c:\result.txt. We then opened the result.txt file and found several policies, however there was one policy that I was quite skeptical about. It showed that the CCMExec service has been configured to run automatically:

GPO: Servers GPO
ServiceName: CcmExec
Startup: Automatic

I reproduced the problem in my lab and verified that if CCMExec is configured to run automatically using a GPO, the Management Point will fail in a ConfigMgr 2012 environment. It’s interesting to note that it does not fail in a ConfigMgr 2007 environment as I tested it in both.

Also note that there is a similar issue with this policy as documented in the Knowledge Base article below:

KB919592 - The Advanced Client in Systems Management Server 2003 and in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 no longer works after you deploy Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919592)

So the resolution is that CCMExec (SMS Agent Host) should not be configured to run automatically using a Group Policy.

Hope this helps!

Muhammad Adil | Senior Consult-Escalation Engineer | PRO Support Middle East & India

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