OCS 2007 Error 515 – “failed to execute registration stored procedure on the back-end”

Recently, after applying SQL Server 2008 SP1 to the SQL server hosting our OCS databases, the following error was observed on the main OCS server when a user tried to login via the OCS client (the user received a ‘server unavailble’ error).

With nothing in the SQL logs to suggest a SQL error, and nothing additional in the client trace logs, I poked the haystack a couple of times to see if any needles fell out, but alas nothing did.

Came across a single post that suggested a solution – that being the following hotfix -http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949935/en-us. However while the error was identical, the symptom wasn’t. All OCS services were starting perfectly fine – to the point there were no errors logged on the OCS box at all when the services started. That said, tried the hotfix – didn’t help (no surprises there).

At this point a closer look was taken at the OCS databases for anything amiss. The only thing out of the ordinary was that within the rtcdyn database, both the RTCHSUniversalAdmins and RTCUniversalService logins were listed within the security section as being disabled (down-arrow icon on their user icon). A little more digging found that these accounts were not disabled at the server level within SSMS, and infact for the two other databases in which they have permissions, they were showing as enabled there as normal.

Immediate thought was to simply overwrite the permissions to resolve the issue, however trying to make any changes to these users against the rtcdyn database resulted in a SQL error along the lines of “User does not exist or you do not have sufficient permissions”. Given I was a sysadmin on the box, the latter seemed unlikely, so clearly there were some issues with the accounts.

In the end, the resolution here was to delete the logins from within the rtcdyn database (not from SQL entirely), then re-add the users to the rtcdyn database – making sure all database permissions were replicated on re-addd.

Note | Before being able to delete the users from the database, you need to change the ownership of a couple of schema objects (SQL will quickly tell you which ones by way of a handy error message). Make sure you change them back afterwards!

Quick OCS service restart once done and all systems back to normal.