Archive for February, 2010

This weekend I felt like adopting a new policy – once a server is installed and running, never, ever update it.  I felt like this because this weekend was my “Rack Maintenance” weekend.  I needed to accomplish three things:

1. Move three servers around.
2. Add a new UPS.
3. Update All of the Servers in the Rack.

This first two went fine – actually the last one did too, in so much as all the updates were applied. But when the time came to turn the servers back on, I hit a snag.  One server – the one controlling our internal Instant Messaging Service, Microsoft Live Communicator 2005, came up, but the refused to start the Communicator Service.

I began searching for the cause of the problem.  According to the event logs, my “Evaluation Period” for Communicator had expired.  WHAT?!  I never installed the evaluation version on this machine.  At this point, I was tired, a bit frustrated and decided to call it day, planning to call Microsoft about it on Monday.  I even posted an email to the entire company stating just that.

Well, as it turned out, I needed to come into the office on Sunday to clean up some things.  While I waited on a copy process, I did a bit more Google searching and found that one of the security patches that I had just applied to the server in some cases broke the Communicator service in a manner similiar to my server’s issue.  Some further reading and a few web pages later and I had found a hot fix.

I immediatly felt like “Silly Microsoft!”  I even laughed out loud.  Then in the very next moment, I said “Really?!”  The brief comical moment turned to frustration.  How could something that should have been a good thing actually caused a problem – breaking a highly used function of my network.  (That’s kind of funny in itself.  A few years ago, I would not have thought that IM would be so widely used in an office environment.)  I seriusly wondered why I had patched the machine in the first place.

The simple truth is, any kind of patch can cause a similiar problem, but I’ve never really had it happen to me – until Saturday.  I guess I could have taken more precautions – spending time reading and following every KB article for every patch applied.  But then I’d never get anything done because all I’d be doing is reading the KB articles.  I guess I handled it about as well as it could be.  In the end the service started and all is well.

So I left the office laughing with the thought that I would call Bill and tell him about our “new policy”.