Recreate Office Web Apps // Proxy

Long time, no blog. Lots to do, and worth blogging about, but I just cannot find the time. Hopefully after March I will.

Recently at a customer I had to recreate the office web apps farm. As I have never done that before I tried naively:
Install the certificate, set the correct URLs on the server and recreate the SPWopiBindings.

Well there was a Proxy in my way, and the URL I wanted to use (spofficewebapps.customer.tld) was not in the list of exceptions.

So it didn’t work (adding the spwopibinding).

Office Web Apps Server:

$dns = "spofficewebapps.customer.tld"
set-location Cert:\LocalMachine\My
$cert = gci | ? { $_.DnsNameList.Unicode -eq $dns } | select -First 1;
$cert.FriendlyName = $dns
Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalURL "https://$dns" -ExternalUrl "https://$dns" -CertificateName "$dns"


SharePoint Server:

Remove-SPWopiBinding -All:$true -Confirm:$false
New-SPWopiBinding -ServerName "spofficewebapps.customer.tld"


What I got is that the Server was not available. Like this:
But my certificate was there, I could reach the https://spofficewebapps.customer.tld/hosting/discovery/ just fine and so none of the results from Google fit my bill.

What now? Well here is the list of remedies:
– Add the new URL to the list of Proxy exceptions
– Do not use Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm, but rather destroy and create (see below)
– Restart all servers involved

Then another thing: My servers aren’t getting the Proxy exceptions pushed. So I had to add them to Internet Explorer manually.

Good Code on Office Web Apps:

Remove-OfficeWebAppsMachine
$dns = "spofficewebapps.customer.tld"
New-OfficeWebAppsFarm -InternalUrl "https://$dns" -CertificateName "$dns" -EditingEnabled -LogLocation "D:\OWA-LOGS" -RenderingLocalCacheLocation "D:\OWA-CACHE"


So after all that I was finally able to add the office web apps back. By the way a host file entry on the SharePoint Server to the Office web apps Server DID NOT HELP.