Exchange error 0x6d9

I noticed my “Offline Address Book” was no longer automatically updating.

Running “get-offlineaddressbook |fl” in the EMS showed it last updated somewhere 16th November 2010.

Trying to manually update it through EMC (“Organizational Configuration > Mailbox > Offline Address Book > right click Default Offline Address Book > click update”) it gave me this error:

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 Microsoft Exchange Error
 --------------------------------------------------------
 Action 'Update' could not be performed on object 'Default Offline Address Book'.
 Default Offline Address Book
 Failed
 Error:
 Failed to generate the content of the offline address book
 '\Default Offline Address Book'.
 Two possible reasons for the failure are that the System Attendant Service is not running or
 you do not have permission to perform this operation. Error message :
 'Error 0x6d9 (There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper) from RpcEpResolveBinding'.
 Error 0x6d9 (There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper) from RpcEpResolveBinding
 --------------------------------------------------------
 OK
 --------------------------------------------------------
 --------------------------------------------------------
 Microsoft Exchange Error
 --------------------------------------------------------
 Action 'Update' could not be performed on object
 'Default Offline Address Book'.
 Default Offline Address BookFailedError:Failed to generate the content of the
 offline address book '\Default Offline Address Book'. Two possible reasons for
 the failure are that the System Attendant Service is not running or you do not
 have permission to perform this operation. Error message :
 'Error 0x6d9 (There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper) from RpcEpResolveBinding'.
 Error 0x6d9 (There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper) from RpcEpResolveBinding
 --------------------------------------------------------
 OK
 --------------------------------------------------------

I googled for quite a while trying to find a fix, but nothing useful could be found.

I then checked the “Microsoft Exchange System Attendant” (yes, something I probably should have done first), to find it was stopped even though its startup type is set to Automatic.

Starting this service fixed the issue, and I could now update the Address Book again.

But rebooting the server, caused the service to not start again (and I couldn’t find anything in event logs).

Solution: change it to delayed start and set the first and 2nd failure to “restart the service” and change “restart the service after” to 5 minutes.

Yes, a dirty work around but this solved it. As this service only takes care of address book generation and legacy support, it’s not critical to start at boot.