Office Web Apps 2013 still seems to have issues if you like to follow basic IT standards and not install applications on the system drive. Originally, I setup an Office Web Apps 2013 SP1 farm to support Lync 2013. I installed Office Web Apps to the D drive as well as configured the cache and logging directories to go to the D drive. OWA is running on Server 2012 R2. Everything worked great with Lync. Then, I added SharePoint 2013, which produced the following errors after a long pause when trying to open PowerPoint and Word files:
Sorry, we can’t open this presentation because we ran into a problem. To view or edit this presentation, open it in Microsoft PowerPoint.
Sorry, Word Web App ran into a problem opening this document. To view this document please open it in Microsoft Word.
Looking in the security event log on the server, you could find errors such as the one below:
Log Name: Security
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing
Date: 6/13/2014 6:42:20 PM
Event ID: 4656
Task Category: Removable Storage
Level: Information
Keywords: Audit Failure
User: N/A
Computer: server.fqdn
Description:
A handle to an object was requested.
Subject:
Security ID: NETWORK SERVICE
Account Name: NETWORK SERVICE
Account Domain: NT AUTHORITY
Logon ID: 0x7A77C
Object:
Object Server: Security
Object Type: File
Object Name: D:\Cache\OfficeWebApps\waccache\LocalCacheStore\NT AUTHORITY_NETWORK SERVICE\9f9212ad37014cdf8eb6964be32f90d2\output.docx
Handle ID: 0x0
Resource Attributes: -
Process Information:
Process ID: 0x1c7c
Process Name: D:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Web Apps\WordConversionService\bin\Converter\AppServerHost.exe
Access Request Information:
Transaction ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Accesses: READ_CONTROL
SYNCHRONIZE
ReadData (or ListDirectory)
ReadEA
ReadAttributes
Access Reasons: -
Access Mask: 0x120089
Privileges Used for Access Check: -
Restricted SID Count: 6
First, I reinstalled the OWA farm to the C drive (System). I can’t stand when applications log to the system drive, so then I started moving one thing at a time over to D. This can be accomplish with the Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm cmdlet. What I found was that changing the ‘RenderingLocalCacheLocation’ is specifically what breaks OWA. Setting the ‘LogLocation’ and the ‘CacheLocation’ to the D drive seems to still work okay.
So, you can still move Logs and Cache to the D drive using the following cmdlet:
Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm -LogLocation:"D:\Logs\OfficeWebApps" -CacheLocation:"D:\Cache\OfficeWebApps\Working\d\"
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