Hi. My name is Quintin and I am a sysadmin/IT manager. From time to time I am asked to help out with some of the work that spills over from the workload of our other technicians.

I am generally OK with that, usually the stuff that I am asked to handle are a bit more advanced that the usual fare, and tend to stretch me an I come out the other side more technically adept.

Once in a while though, I get faced with a problem that causes me to break into uncontrollable swearing. I then – generally under my breath – spew vitriol at the computer screen that would not be uttered in polite company, and sometimes even in not-so-polite company.

Today was such a day…

Some Background

My ill feeling towards this particular user computer started a day before. You see, this genius went on leave and decided that this would be a good time for us to reinstall his computer with Windowd 7.

I made it abundantly clear to him and his manager that the files on his computer that he wants should be backed up on our file server (as per company policy this should be done daily) and that we will format his hard drive.

Right before he left this genius goes to proby and says “do not format the partitioned drive – I backed up my stuff there.”

The day the work was done proby explained this to me, and since there was two drives in the computer, one which was partitioned and one that was not I gave the instruction to format the C drive – it was not partitioned.

As an extra safety measure I told proby to save everything in “Documents and Settings” just in case something important gets disappearified.

Come yesterday Geniusdude was upset. Back from holidays and his important data was lost! I pointed out that we had backed up “Documents and Settings” just in case, and he said that he had done the same, BUT “The stuff I need was not in there… it was somewhere else…”

Fu*&.

We had to do a recovery.

THEN the dude had the gall to go to the boss and tune him that we hadn’t finished his computer on time so he could not work. RIGHT – after sorting that out we got to the reason for my day going slightly pear shaped today….

“My localhost doesn’t work…”

A typically descriptive statement by a user who knows what he is talking about.

His problem turned out to be rather complex – but the symptoms where non indicative of what the actual problem was.

You see, he is a web developer, and as such we had installed IIS from the Windows features.

Problem was, when he typed in “localhost” or “127.0.0.1″ in his browser BING automagically searched for the terms online.

Eventually I narrowed it down to IIS “default web page” not being started, even though IIS was started. Go figure. Typical doing things twice in Microsoft land. I can understand that the other webpages he had created not being auto started, but IIS not having a running default web page is just stupid.

Got that working, I type “localhost” in the browser, and instantly a 401.3 error appears in RED nogal, proclaiming to the world that I did not have permission to access the site.

Logon as? Anonymous. Check the ACL of the directory? Check. Add “everyone” with full permissions? CHECK. Try the fixes in no less than SEVEN Microsoft knowledge base articles? CHEECK!! Add the IUSR accounts with permissions to the directory? CHEEEEECK!!!

and so on.

After an hour of trying every possible fscking fix online I was doing the aforementioned spewing of vitriol under my breath.

The dev sitting next to me skyping his girlfriend from his phone cautiosly moved his seat a meter or so back. Afraid that I was gonne wail into him next.

THE FIX!!!!1!1!

Then I fixed it. I enabled “Simple Logon” in IIS, and now the user needs to enter his username and password for Internet Explorer before the site loads. Once, until he closes and reopens IE again.

I swear. In the time it took me to “fix” his problem I could have set up Apache on a Linux box and gone home with my sanity in tact.

This particular problem seems prevalent if you go look for it online. Suggested fixes include giving permissions to the correct user to the directory (usually wwroot) or adding Anonymous as an application pool and so on.

Summary

I have one question – why does it seem like the more features a piece of software gets, the less intuitive and more elaborate the most simple problems turn out to fix?

I guess it is a scale of complexities thing.

Heck. What a day. Effing IIS…

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