Your Friend is Here: The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2148073478 (0x80090006).

Thursday, August 29, 2013

The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2148073478 (0x80090006).

Error: -

Source:        Service Control Manager
Event ID:      7024
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
User:          N/A
Computer:      Server

Description:
The IIS Admin Service service terminated with service-specific error 2148073478 (0x80090006).
Event Xml:
http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event

">


    7024
    0
    2
    0
    0
    0x80000000000000

    49238816


    System
    Server


    IIS Admin Service
    2148073478 (0x80090006)

Symptom: -

Windows could not start the IIS Admin Service on Local Computer.

World wide service may or may not start.

System can not find the file specified.

Cause and overview: -

The reason IISADMIN fails to start in this scenario is because of a failure to decrypt secure data (User ACLs, Passwords) in Metabase.xml file, and the connectivity with MachineKeys. The MachineKey is a file that IIS uses to decrypt secure data in the Metabase.xml. There can be many machine key files in machineKeys directory, but the Machinekey for IIS starts with “c23”.

We can see machinekeys in two locations:

The first location which is well known: -

%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

The other location:-

%windir%\Profiles\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys

How to locate correct location for MachineKeys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders

And from this path we can confirm the correct location for MachineKeys

Checks for resolution: -

1) Make sure we’ve a metabase.xml file at C:\windows\system32\inetsrv folder

2) Make sure we’ve a C23 MachineKey file at the location found in above path

3) Ensure we’ve necessary permissions as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278381/en-us

4) If you’ve only one instance, then check and make sure that the date on the key matches the date from the time when IIS was installed on the server. If the date is newer than the last IIS install date, then the MachineKey that was used to encrypt the metabase got lost and you’d have to reinstall IIS (if you don’t have the MachineKyes backup anywhere)

5) Or else you could look at the suffix of C23 key (the entire length that follow “_” in the C23 key) and check if it is different from any of the suffixes for other keys in the container. This means that the machineKey (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptographic\MachineGUID) for the machine has changed since the IIS was last installed on the machine. If you don’t have a second instance of the “C23” key, then replace the suffix of the older key with the MachineGUID value found the the registry and delete the newer key. You should be able to restart IIS admin at this point. Also remember that this does not fix IISadmin service startup problem, but prevents the C23 duplicate issue from happening again (which might be the cause of IISAdmin startup issue).

6) Finally if it does not help to get the service start then you can use MSConfig to disable all the third party (Non-Microsoft) service and see if it help to get the service start.

***Additional Recommendation

Ensure that you backup IIS with password secure option on regular basis, you can use this copy to transfer as well. The full procedure to perfrom that can be found here

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/131b609d-ff3a-488f-a8dd-13044fa623a1.mspx?mfr=true

Ensure that the machine keys are also backed up in the full system backup jobs.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246459/en-us