SFU and Windows 2003 Server SP2
October 19th, 2007
I just installed SP2 on a server running Windows 2003 Server and discovered that, after rebooting, SFU (Windows Services for UNIX) is broken. To be specific, SFU services don't start and if you open a console you don't get a command prompt.
Apparently this is a known issue and you have reinstall SFU 3.5 all over again after installing SP2.
Pain!
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Thanks to the Support guys at work, I've discovered that the problem doesn't, after all, involve reinstalling SFU. The problem is well described here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sfu/archive/2007/04/27/windows-server-2003-sp2-breaks-sfu.aspx
The root cause lies with SP2 unintentionally replacing the SFU 3.5 Interix binaries and Password Synchronization binaries with corresponding R2 binaries. The specific files that get replaced after installing SP2 are psxss.exe, psxdll.dll and pswdsync.dll. First two are part of the SFU 3.5 Interix subsystem and the last belongs to SFU 3.5 Password Synchronization component.
Microsoft has now produced a hotfix that solves the problem by putting back a working version of psxss.exe:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936529
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