Today was possibly the busiest, longest, and most frustrating day I’ve ever had at work. Not stressful though… I don’t do stress. Stress happens to other people. Frustration though? That I can get by the bucketful.
IIS decided that it was going to shit itself every 15 minutes and restart after three and a half months of near continuous running with no problems whatsoever. The problem was, when it restarted it helpfully left the SMTP service and Web Service [1] out of the restart procedure. This had to be done manually.
With our server being playfully unhelpful every single member of staff rang me in a 5 minute period. I swear they organised a rota or something because the instant I put the phone down it was ringing again.
With those good times behind me I trawled the Microsoft Knowledgebase [2] for a fix for this phantom service killer. Lo and behold! 3 patches later with the obligatory server restarts, of course [3], I had a working IIS that wasn’t prone to empty it’s proverbial bowels at the drop of a hat.
But that’s not all folks! Oh, no. IIS stopping and starting apparently caused our spam and content filter to commit suicide. Great.
Long story, short; When it came to 5.30 everything was made to work again, even if it did take up most of my day. At which point I was asked to move some office furniture around. I thought that was the icing on the cake. Lets get the trained IT professional to move office furniture around after he’s been busting his chops all day to keep the company connected to the outside world. Lets not waste our time with the clueless-can’t-find-their-arse-with-an-atlas gap year students, lets go right to the top.
Yes, this has been a rant. Yes, I’m tired and grouchy. Yes, I’m going to leave you alone now.
[1] Pretty much the whole reason for IIS existing.
[2] Why it is called a knowledge base is beyond me.
[3] I thought they’d culled that unfortunate requirement in windows 2000!? Surely in this day and age we can simply restart the affected services?