Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

Halloween comes a few hours early for me.... Scary!

So.. its about 8:30... i'm finishing up some things here at work.. First day back in the office after being out most of last week for training... I happened to notice THIS on our production web server's homepage (and ever page on every site):

This.. for those of you who may not have guessed.. is a BAD thing. Turns out that IIS (Microsoft's webserver) is crashing right when it starts up.. even on a completely plain website. After running down a lot of possible solutions... we have come up with absolutely nothing. Other then a mysterious entry in the system log:

A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '3952'. The process exit code was '0x80'.

So... I isolated out the main website into its own application pool... and it crashes immediately. Ok.. I disable all the webserver extensions.. still crashes. Finally, create a pool for a basic HTML only website.. and it too fails to produce any different results.

Seeing as how a large percentage of our business relies on this actually working, we are faced with a decision... switch to a back up server that can't really handle the load too well, or.. bend over and call Microsoft for a Paid Phone Support Call. After deciding that its critical to get this machine up and running we pull the trigger on the support call.

That was about 10:30PM once we got the call started... Pleasantly surprised to find out that the normal cost of a support call, $245, only applies from 6am - 6pm Pacific time. Since we are unlucky enough to have a problem in off hours... this little beauty is costing us $490 (see MS site).

It's now 11:45 and I've spoken to two people at microsoft to describe the problem just for them to figure out who I should be directed to. The last 45 minutes or so I've been on hold for. Will keep adding to this post to keep my sanity alive while I'm trying to resolve this.