Thursday 8 January 2015

Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS): The Revocation Function was Unable to Check Revocation Because the Server was Offline 0x80092013 (-2146885613 CRYTP_E_REVOCATION_OFFLINE)

You are configuring an Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) infrastructure, and you are at the point where you are importing the certificate that was generated by your certificate request from the Root CA. When you try to use the Import CA Certificate from the Certificate Authority MMC you receive the following error "The Revocation Function was Unable to Check Revocation Because the Server was Offline 0x80092013 (-2146885613 CRYTP_E_REVOCATION_OFFLINE)."

This was because when I configured the CDP and AIA information when I was configuring the Root CA I added HTTP locations for the Issuing CA.
When I look at the certificate that I am trying to import, under CRL Distribution Points there are two listed. The Offline CA currently has no network connectivity, therefore it cannot resolve that one, even if it could it will be taken offline after the initial configuration of the AD CS infrastructure. Notice how there is a URL pointing to the Issuing CA.

The problem here was I had forgotten to copy the CRL file generated from the Root CA into the IIS Web Server folder on the Issuing CA. 

Once I copied the CRL file over to the Web Server folder that was accessible in the CRL Distribution Points URL I tried starting the AD CS service again.