Uploading of a .cab file to Update Server WSS site fails with an HttpException and the message Request timed out.

Sometimes, when you upload a new .cab file for Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Phone Edition or Microsoft RoundTable using the OCS 2007 Software Update Service Management Console Upload Software feature, the upload fails with an HttpException and the message Request timed out in the event log. The actual exception might vary, but the real reason is typically lack of resources on the WSS server. The resources lacking might be memory or CPU or a combination of both. You typically get the exception because the upload of the .cab times out. If you run into this try to add resources, i.e. more memory or more CPU capacity. If that is not possible here are a couple of tips you can use to increase the various time-outs.

On the server running the OCS 2007 Software Update Service Management Console you can edit the web.config file found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Web Components\UC Device Updates\Management Console. The web.config file controls the .NET requests the Management Console is using to talk to the WSS server. The web.config is per default read protected, so you have to make it writeable before editing it. In the file is a XML section called httpRuntime. This is the section you can tune. HttpRuntime is described here https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641(VS.71).aspx. In my test environment I'm using the following settings <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="900000" executionTimeout="300" appRequestQueueLimit="30"/> . This mean that the client will time-out after 300 seconds or 5 minutes.

Now you have changed the client time-out, but you typically also need to change the server side time-out on the WSS server. This is done by tuning the IIS time-out setting. The default is 120 seconds, but you can increase that by using the instructions in https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/925083. On my test system I use 300 seconds. After changing the time-out stop and restart the web site hosting WSS.

Update 21-JAN-08: The above tuning is not the complete fix. The code itself is using other timeouts. We are investigating this and will report back.

Update 28-FEB-08: Please install the build released today  https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=889c542e-8b09-46c2-bd86-671c21668830. It should fix the issue with .cab upload error.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  One of the best documented reasons for a cab file upload to fail is due to timeout settings in IIS. For