I love writing about technology for reasons just like this.

We've got a launcher service that won't launch.  Owen Wilson would be proud.

Just when I was getting ready to finish up my Multi-Farm Deployment Guide before the weekend, I look at Services on Server and I see that my Document Conversion Launcher Server is still Starting.  And since it's been about 24 hours since I started it, I'm guessing that means I have a problem.

The good news is tha our new best friend Karthik ran into this before we did and he told us how to fix it here.

First, the question arises how do you make it quit saying "Starting"?  I opened the DCLS page and changed my load balancer server from my server to "none" and clicked OK.  So now, on the Services on Server page, it says "Stopped."

Now Karthik's instructions are not perfectly clear to me so here's what I'm going to try:

I'm looking up the port number on the DC Load Balancer Service Settings page and it's port 8093.  This is different from DC Launcher Service port number.

I'm looking up this key in the regisry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\LauncherSettings

Sure enough, there's a LoadBalancerURL key and a Port key.

My Load Balancer is running on server named MySSPServer so I'm setting the keys as follows:

• LoadBalancerURL: http://MySSPServer:8093/HtmlTrLoadBalancer
• Port: 8093

Karthik follows by saying that the Launcher Service should be stopped and restarted in the Control Panel | Services MMC.  In my case that service had not been enabled.  I changed it to enabled and automatic like Karthik, said and then I started it.

Now, I have to admit that, first time through, I was using the wrong port number. Then I realized I should be using the Load Balancer Service port number, not the DC Launcher Service port number.  So I stopped everything again and started over and still had no luck.

Karthik continues to suggest a restart using stsadm.  His instructions include a routine to run the enumservices out to a text file and then use the values form the text file to fill in a provisionserivce command, first stopping, resetting IIS, starting and resetting IIS again.

His instuction are kind of complicated but my provisionservice calls looked like this:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype Microsoft.Office.Server.Conversions.LauncherService -servicename dclauncher

And:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype Microsoft.Office.Server.Conversions.LauncherService -servicename dclauncher

He says you'd have to do this again when you add servers but I'm not so sure that's in the cards.  I'm also not sure a simple IIS reset would have sufficed after I stopped the service and then again after I started it.  But, in any event, the DCLS is now "Started" and, if it's ever needed, it might work.

Thanks for reading along!

-robot

ps. Oh, my friend that's a spokesrobot for Server 2008 is currently appearing on LinkedIn.com.  I could have had that gig if I had spent more time in server school.