August 20th, 2008Exchange 2007/Entourage FAMV4.SYS issue summary from Microsoft
I just received the official case summary from Microsoft. I thought I would publish it here for the benefit of anyone using old man Google to solve this problem.
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Symptoms
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When a large number of items is put into the inbox, calendar, contacts, etc., Exchange Active Sync (EAS) or Entourage Client Sync will fail.
Errors
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The errors can vary from the standard “TIMEOUT” errors to 0×85010014. In a DAV trace, to summarize, you will see I/O consistently “PENDING” and 0 bytes read from file. This ‘file’ is the streaming file.
More Information
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EAS and Entourage request mail from IIS/DAV. DAV requests the mail from the STORE. If the store needs to package a large amount of items, it will package them using a STREAM file. IIS/DAV reads from this stream file. IIS/DAV returns the information to EAS/Entourage.
Problem
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IIS/DAV uses Kernel32::ReadFile() to read from the stream. A 3rd party kernel driver (FAMv4.sys) intercepts these calls to ReadFile() and returns bad data. This causes our ‘read’ thread to go into a perpetual ‘PENDING’ state. For every “PENDING” returned, a POLLING thread is spawned, causing performance problems for the W3WP.exe ExchangeAppPool as well.
Resolution
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Open REGEDIT.exe
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
Look for FAMv4 under the Services Key.
Set the “Startup” value to 4 so that it disables the FAMv4 service.
Open a cmd prompt.
Type NET STOP FAMV4. This stops the FAMv4 service.
Sync your EAS or Entourage clients without issue.
More Information about FAMv4
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FAMv4 stands for File Access Manager and it is made by Vision Works Solutions Incorporated. Their website is http://www.vwsolutions.com/. It is essentially an open file utility that allows backup programs to backup open files. You can find out more about how it works from http://www.vwsolutions.com/FAM/howitworks.aspx. It works with several backup programs and since it is ‘hidden’ in the registry and not listed in services.msc, it is probably licensed by other backup companies as their open file backup solution.
We ask that our customers contact Vision Works Solutions at 1.888.310.6706 or the customer’s individual backup solution to obtain a fix for FAMv4.sys.
August 24th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Before the update did you have any problems with Entourage syncing calendar items. Specifically, did you have any users who would simply have calendar items disappear?
August 24th, 2008 at 7:40 am
About a week prior to noticing that we were having trouble sync’ing I did receive a complain that contacts items were disappearing for an Entourage user. Nobody noticed any Calendar items, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Disappearing calendar items can be caused by AV software incorrectly configured on the server as well.
September 30th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Hi,
My name is Brian R. Bondy and I am the CTO of VisionWorks Solutions Inc., developers of File Access Manager (FAMv4.sys).
File Access Manager allows backup applications to open exclusively opened files for backup. Several different backup software companies license our driver FAMv4.sys from us and distribute it.
This incompatibility is common with file system filter drivers and we already resolved the incompatibility in the latest release of File Access Manager. You can obtain Version 4.1.7 at the below link.
Updates can be found here: http://www.vwsolutions.com/FAM/trial.aspx
For any future updates or questions you can reach our support techs here:
http://www.vwsolutions.com/support/submitTicket.aspx