This weekend while I was patching and rebooting KVM systems for Venom I took the opportunity to apply Microsoft’s latest Exchange Cumulative Update 8 work’s Exchange server.

I ran the pre-upgrade checks and  they picked up that my user wasn’t in the correct AD groups for scheme updates, once that was fixed the upgrade started without problems.

When the upgrade got to Section 10 – Mailbox role: Transport Services the upgrade failed because a certificate had expired. Fine just install an updated certificate but all of the Exchange management tools have been uninstalled so you can’t get to the certificate.

When you rerun the installer it detects the failed install and tries to resume and fails at the same place, in the end I had to move the clock back two days on the server to get the management tools to install so that the certificate could be replaced.

I’ve reviewed the Microsoft documentation and I can’t see any reference to this problem and it wasn’t detected in the pre-upgrade checks. I’m sure there is some powershell magic that could fix this but at 1am on a Monday morning I wasn’t all that interested in finding out!