If you’re anything like me there will be times when you’re so busy (or maybe a little lazy) you might just count hope on the fact that a Microsoft install will check installation prerequisites and warn / install them for you.
Unfortunately Exchange 2010 isn’t one of those installations. Using a default install of Windows Server 2008 R2. I performed an installation of Exchange Server 2010. Using only the pre-installation checker during the installation process I installed only what was requested to get Exchange 2010 to install. For the most part this was fine. It gave me a functioning Exchange 2010 test server.
It wasn’t till I tested OWA that I found it didn’t install or notify me of all the prerequisite web components.
When I browsed to OWA I was redirected to https://exchangeserver.local/owa/auth/logon.aspx?url=https://exchangeserver.local/owa&reason=0
Fortunately the fix was rather simple. It required two PowerShell commands and no Exchange service restarts.
Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Basic-Auth,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Metabase,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console,WAS-Process-Model,RSAT-Web-Server,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-Digest-Auth,Web-Dyn-Compression,NET-HTTP-Activation,RPC-Over-HTTP-Proxy -Restart