Painful Lessons

It has been a long week, yet I believe a productive one. This week marks my 3 month anniversary at the new company. Therefore, a review was setup. On that very same day, I decided to add some Windows network monitoring components to our main server, and uninstall every other Windows component. Yes, disaster ensued.

It will be a long time before I forget the sheer terror. . .yes that is the word I have been searching for all week. . I felt pure. . full-blown terror as soon as I realized what I had done. . .uninstalled IIS from an Exchange Server. I knew immediately that I was in really deep do-do. . .and had no idea what to do.

To make a long story short. . .a friend walked me through it. What had to be done was that IIS had to be completely removed and then reinstalled. After that, we found that the Exchange Routing Engine Service would not start, so a reinstall of Exchange and the most recent service pack was necessary (based on KB323672). After an intense 3 hours, all was back to normal for the most part.

I learned much from this experience. . .
1. Good friends really are there for you at all times, and it is our job to do all we can to keep them.
2. Most testing and "playing" with servers should really not be done on production boxes.
3. Most mistakes can be recovered from.
4. Good bosses, like good friends are really hard to find. Once you find one that gets it, do all you can to keep them happy with you and your work.

Follow-up Issues

I now get the following error on my Exchange Server:
MS ExchangeMTA
Event ID 9318
An RPC communications error occurred. Unable to bind over RPC. Locality Table (LTAB) indes: 233, Windows 2000/MTA error code: 9297. Comms error 9297, Bind error 9297, Remote Server Name S4IMAGE [MAIN BASE 1 500%10] (14)