Today I had to go and visit a client of the Brisbane ISP I work for. I wasn’t sure I could fix the problems they were having, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway.
They’re running Microsoft Exchange, IIS5 and some accounting software on their Windows 2000 Server (actually Small Business Server). The box sure earns its living. The problems were that nobody could logon to the domain, nobody could login to their Outlook/Exchange accounts, and the backups kept crashing every night because of a disk corruption. If you tried to view the Active Directory Users and Computers console, it wouldn’t let you in, saying that the logon attempt failed.
The disk corruption thing was easy to fix; they’d tried to run Scandisk, which looks to me like a GUI front-end for chkdsk. So Scandisk would find that there was a problem on D:, but couldn’t fix it because, like chkdsk, it can only fix problems when the volume isn’t mounted, such as at system startup. So I just brought out trusty cmd.exe and ran chkdsk /f on C: and D:, just to be safe. We had to wait for a while before all the lusers had finished putting their luser babble data into the system (as if computer systems are meant to be used for actual data) before restarting. It obediently replaced some index or something on D: and the problem was fixed. Hopefully the backup problem will go away — we’ll find out tonight! Ooooh.
Now, the other problem, that of the AD Users and Computers and such, I didn’t know how to fix. Luckily for me, the best search engine ever was close at hand. So I searched around and searched around and searched around, until I found out how to fix it when Active Directory MMC snap-ins fail. Apparently, the Windows 2000 security settings became corrupted. Windows handily keeps a backup in %SystemRoot\Repair\secsetup.inf and secdc.inf, and you can just use the commands specified in that page to restore it back to its former glory. I tried it and it worked. Whooo!
That was my one success this week. Everything else I have tried set straight has made a mess of my ego. I hate computers.