Does Anyone Else Use Microsoft RMS?

I think not, which leads to a dearth of searchable content when I encounter an issue.

My latest round of technical snafus that I’ve encountered with Microsoft’s digital rights management software for Windows 2003 revolve around the fact that I’d like to upgrade the server to Windows Server 2008.  I’d love even more to port it to the 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2, but I gave up on ever getting that to work.

However I did get a virtual lab install of the server to upgrade to regular old 32 bit Server 2008, except that RMS on 2008 runs off of SQL (express) 2005.  Unfortunately my existing install of RMS was running on the old MSDE 2000.  After making sure that the SQL upgrade worked, I upgraded MSDE on the server to Express and everything seemed to run okay, except that occasionally the DRMS_Logging service wouldn’t start.  I’d start it back, and at some point in time it would stop (sometimes stopping right away after I tried to start it).  Finally, I couldn’t get it to start at all (to be fair to myself I figuring it was a timing issue with IIS since cycling IIS seemed to get the RMS service to start, though obviously this turned out to be a coincidence).

When I first looked at the server I noticed that I was getting ‘file full’ SQL errors, which I figured came about because SQL Express was hitting it’s space limit.  When I looked at the MOM/Onepoint database I noticed that it had grown quite large.  I looked up how to purge data and the posts all seemed to go back to the ‘sqlagent’ running a process that ran a stored procedure that handled the ‘grooming’.  After messing around with the SQL Express installer a bit looking for the agent install I’d found that although the SQL agent at least appeared to be included with MSDE 2000, it’s not with 2005.  I then went through the database and determined that the procedure ‘dbo.MOMXGrooming’ was the winner.  After executing that and shrinking the DB and files it cleared up the SQL space issue.  Yet still, the DRMS_Logging service wouldn’t start.

I looked at the logging database for RMS and it was rather large as well, but with no built in grooming procedure I just dropped the table and recreated it (backing up first of course).  The service still wouldn’t start, no errors, no nothing.  I figured that even though it wasn’t working it was worth looking at the web management piece to see if it would let me configure it.  When I tried to pull it up, the site kicked out an error saying that it could not run because the event viewer was full – the application event log had filled up with SQL space errors.  After purging the log, the service started and people could get into their documents yet again.

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