Damn it Jim, I'm a Designer not a System Administrator!

****WARNING!!****GEEK SPEAK POST****WARNING!!****

You most likely won't give a shit about this, but it has occupied my thoughtspace for almost the entire week, and so I blog.

We have a dedicated web server at HAM that has been hosted for years with Rackspace, so many years in fact that the hosting facility it was housed in is not even used as a hosting facility anymore. The OS, Windows 2000, has reached its end-of-life, as has SQL Server 2000, AS has the box it was all installed on.

So they upgraded us to a new hosting facility, with a new box that has Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2003 installed, which is AWESOME! And FREE!

Only problem is, everything that was hosted on that box had to move to the new box. Web sites. Client presentation pages. Multiplayer servers. The whole shebang.

Who's job description does all that fall under?

*crickets chirping*

Yeah, no one. So... me.

Luckily, I don't mind such things. My left brain functions as well as my right, and it knows just enough to be dangerous when it comes to all things technical. I can really break something without much effort at all.

Like our voicemail system.

A day after I pointed a subdomain that I barely remembered to the new server, one of our developers noticed he wasn't getting his voicemail in his email anymore. Hmmm. Funny thing.

Oh, wait. That's right -- we had to fake out our old voicemail system and relay its email messages through the old web server to get them to send properly.

Well, I done did broke dat good.

I wasn't about to purchase another license to install a mail server on the new web server just for this one instance, so I opted to set up the mail server in IIS with the help of some tutorials on the internets. I then set up an email account in Mail and successfully sent an email through the new server.

AWESOME.

Except when I configured the voicemail server to use the new server, messages did not come through at all, and the only error it gave was some stupid generic (ec=2) thing that could be anything.

CRAP.

After I got the kids to bed last night, I scoured the internet for clues about why the goddamn voicemail system was being an asshole and came up pretty much dry, until I saw someone's hint to someone else to use this tool called Wireshark. I installed it on the voicemail server so I could see what the actual network traffic could tell me, and though I don't speak Network Traffic, that whole knows-enough-to-be-dangerous thing paid off. I was able to decipher enough to realize that I'd been blaming the wrong asshole.

The problem wasn't the voicemail server, it was IIS on the new server. Even though the voicemail server was acting like it should, IIS didn't like the way it was talking to it, so it wouldn't talk to the voicemail server at all.

See? Asshole.

So anyway, with the help of the internets again and some more detailed error codes that IIS was throwing up, I got to the heart of it and had to go in and change some deeply hidden registry key sorta thing to make IIS be a little more forgiving.

When I finally beat it, I actually whoooped out loud and started clapping for myself. Right there in the office.

I know, sounds NOTHING like me, right? ;)