What happened to my Summer--Part 1
What happened to my Summer when Earthlink killed my DSL service in the middle of an SBS2003 Migration?
Part 1--Falling into the Abyss
I was migrating my server because the box had been having heating problems—shutting down when the temps got into the eighties, and then just after running for 20 minutes (about the time it takes to boot.). I traced this to the fan in the power supply going out, and temporarily patched things by duct taping a fan to the outlet of the power supply and sucking the cooling air through. Needless to say, high room temps were still a problem. And, for some reason, the fans kept dying on me. So a new power supply had to be installed; but my customer-from-hell would not consider being without email for the three-days the shop would take for non-priority shop-rates. So it was decided to migrate the server to the X64 box, in preparation for that someday when SBS will require an X64 box, an take the computer in for a new power supply when that was in place. Then, after that, with a safe backup system in hand, I could start the SS2003 Service Pack 1 upgrade.
All went well with the migration. I used ADMT once to create a swing system with the migrated AD, and then used ADMT again to migrate back to the same domain name, password, company name, etc. I was almost done—the Exchange databases had been forklifted into place and I was testing NNTP, which wasn’t flowing, when I lost my DSL connection. I flailed about for two days trying to reset my parameters and recover the connection—telnetting into the modem and resetting everything again and again. Still nothing. So I tried setting the modem up to use the PPPoE back end and not dealing with those problems in the receiving computer. Still no go. That is when I started hitting the support lines. Turns out my modem was part of a special purchase by Earthlink to meet the sudden demand when DirecTV abandoned its non-TV subscribers. Consequently, it was not set, in hardware, to EarthLink transmission parameters (that is another, earlier saga), and you had to manually reset them. I sat through many attempts by the level 1 techs to reset the modem and bring it back on line. It always failed, and they would not listen to me that one had to telnet in and reset the hard-wired parameters. They weren’t trained for that modem, etc. Finally, I was given a Level 2 case number and a telephone number to level 2 techs, so I didn’t have to waste time with the level 1 people. Level 2 techs were not much better—only one knew that modem existed, but he couldn’t get the connection to work. Finally, Earthlink said that they had changed my service to a Verizon switchboard, which was not operational, and I would be back on line by Friday. It didn’t happen, and they wouldn’t ship a new modem without a year’s contract. I balked—what kind of service is this that will cause a problem and then will not send the fix on the same terms that existed! Meanwhile, as this had taken three weeks already, my customer was fit-to-be-tied and demanded blood. I signed up with Verizon, and called Earthlink to request an RNA for the VOIP box that was part of the bundled service that I had ordered, but was dependent on the improved service. That was when Earthlink explained that, even though they wanted a years commitment for the new modem, it would really cost no more than the month-to-month fees that I was currently paying. Would I please allow them to send the modem in case Verizon screwed up? Foolishly, I agreed, and still have not received full credit for the returned hardware.
Also, during this enforced down-time, I took the old server box into the shop and had a new power supply installed. I hooked it up, started the boot process, and waited and waited and waited. I took more than an hour, and then none of the Exchange services were up. The error message said it could not start without a domain. The DNS service did not show a controller. Nothing worked. My distress posts on this followes:
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From: =?Utf-8?B?SG9sbGlzX1BhdWxfbXZw?= <Hollis_Paul_mvp@noemail.nospam>
Subject: LDAP has died on my SBS server! Anyway to revive it?
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:04:02 -0700
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs
When I switched back to my "production" SBS server, I tried to post a NNTP
message. I got a reply that it could not connect to the server. I looked at
the SBS box and noticed that the cpu usage was red lining. When I couldn't
reduce it, I decided to reboot. It took forever to come done and something
like 45minutes to an hour to boot up.?? Some services had failed to start.
So I checked. The Exchange Infostore was one, so I attempted to start it.
It wouldn't. So I checked the Application log. There were event messages
saying it could not resolve a domain name. I tried to start the Domain and
Site applet from the Administrative tools, but it reported that there was no
server there.
I stopped the computer and rebooted. Same thing. 45 minutes to an hour to
open the user interface. The domain server did not exist. I was able to
login, but probably from cached data. Is there anyway to revive this beast?
Or is it time for a Repair Installation?
--
Hollis D Paul [Outlook - MVP]
emorchadok
Mukilteo, WA USA
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From: "David Copeland [MSFT]" <davidcop@online.microsoft.com>
Subject: Re: LDAP has died on my SBS server! Anyway to revive it?
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 19:49:55 -0500
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs
Hollis,
If the server is only pointing to itself for DNS (by default it would be)
then is the DNS service started and set to automatic? If you go to a
command prompt on the server and do the following
nslookup
> servername.contoso.local.
> exit
is it able to resolve it? Note that servername would be the name of your
server and contoso.local would be the AD DNS name. Also note that I added a
trailing period to fully qualify the name.
If the service is started, and nslookup fails to resolve it.. You can check
to make sure that the DNS service is listening on port 53 by using the
following command:
netstat -aon | find "53"
Then use either tasklist /svc or task manager to match up the process id to
the process name.
If the DNS service is listening and the name was able to be resolved using
nslookup, then may need to check in the registry
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257623
Note that if there is corruption in the values you may not be able to see
it.. Before making any changes to the registry be sure to have either a
system state backup and/or at least an export out the registry keys you
modify.
--
Hope that helps,
David Copeland
Microsoft Small Business Server Support
*************************************
From: =?Utf-8?B?SG9sbGlzX1BhdWxfbXZw?= <Hollis_Paul_mvp@noemail.nospam>
Subject: Re: LDAP has died on my SBS server! Anyway to revive it?
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:21:02 -0700
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs
Thanks, David, for the suggestions.
I am going to take the box into the shop tomorrow to get the power supply
replaced, and then get back to trouble shooting it next week. In the
meantime, I will be working to finish the swing migration that I have been
working on last week or so. I just installed the Trend-Micro SMB suite,
which works mostly now. And I need to fix the NNTP throughput problem. Then
I will have a system, on a 64-bit machine, I can use to upgrade when the
64-bit SBS comes out.
So, till next week, this box can rest in the down state.
--
Hollis D Paul [Outlook - MVP]
emorchadok
Mukilteo, WA USA
************************************
From: =?Utf-8?B?SG9sbGlzX1BhdWxfbXZw?= <Hollis_Paul_mvp@noemail.nospam>
Subject: Re: LDAP has died on my SBS server! Anyway to revive it?
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:19:01 -0700
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs
Well, I didn't get it to the shop today, so I thought I might check how
company web was setup in the old dns... Turns out that the dns service
cannot be started because there is no domain. So, it is a trifle moot about
what can or cannot be resolved, because there is no dns server to resolve it.
Bummer, no?
--
Hollis D Paul [Outlook - MVP]
emorchadok
Mukilteo, WA USA
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Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:44:05 -0700
From: "Susan Bradley, CPA aka Ebitz - SBS Rocks [MVP]" <sbradcpa@pacbell.net>
Subject: Re: LDAP has died on my SBS server! Anyway to revive it?
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs
If you are going from one server to another... the original server can
and does remain functional with no bad effects...
Can you describe what you did to "disable the domain"?
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That didn’t really go anywhere, and it was being done from the Mukilteo Library’s free computers.
Shortly after this, I decided that I had dorked with the migrated server enough that a boot would probably be advantages. Alas, it took nearly an hour to boot and exhibited the same dead domain as the original SBS server. Life seemed really scary at this point. I did at least one, and maybe two, repair re-installs and never got to problem to go away. I was considering another partition wipe and migration from the swing system, which I presumed to be unaffected by the madness exhibited by the other servers as it had not ever been running during this time. But I put that off to get back on the air with Verizon.
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