Death of a Partition

Somebody at work was fiddling with the fuse box and took out all the servers in the IT room. I rebooted them all but our main file server wouldn't boot, the hard disk partition was fried.

I used a knoppix CD (excellent tool for any pc that won't boot from its hard disk) to delete the corrupt partition and then reinstalled Windows 2k server on it. Experience has taught me that there is little point in trying to repair windows installations. Fortunately this file server is set up with two disks, one for the OS and another for the data. This is a nice arrangement as if either disk dies, that's approximately half the work required to get the thing back up. I only had to reinstall Windows.

Things were back online by lunchtime, the only problem being that one of the computers in the building was unable to access the new shared file system: mine! Vista strikes again (this is one reason why I am using Vista, to iron out these sillies). It wouldn't connect to the file share without prompting for user name and password and it wouldn't accept any that I gave (apart from those for a local account on the PC, it wouldn't accept domain account details).

I decided the problem may be that in my haste to get the files online and people working, I omitting to install the latest service packs on the server. I ran the setup for service pack 4 and then remotely rebooted the server from home early this morning while nobody was using it. I connected to it using an ssh tunnel and ultravnc. For reference, the ssh tunnel command was:

ssh -L 5900:192.168.0.54:5900 me@work.com

This is saying, 'connect port 5900 on the pc 192.168.0.54 on the remote network to port 5900 on my local pc'. I connected to a linux server and used this as a relay to connect to the file server. I was able to open ultravnc at 127.0.0.1:5900 and see the windows desktop of the file server. Secure, magical, free. Yes, I could do all this with VPN's, Windows Remote Desktop, Terminal Services or whatever but ssh/vnc is much easier to set up and is immune to random weird Active Directory problems.

I opened 'Computer Management' and 'Shared Folders' and 'Open Files' which gives a nice list of who is using the file server. One user had 'desktop.ini' opened, nothing important so ZAP.

Anyway, the service pack did the trick and when I got to work Vista connected instantly.

Lessons learnt:

Know where the Windows Install disks are
Have the licence numbers printed and hung on the wall (not in a file on the server that just died, in an Access 2003 database, in a room full of servers with no copies of Access).
Buy a UPS, although it runs the risk that nothing ever fails and everyone thinks administration is easy. With the right tools it is, but don't let the world know.

Peter's Blog - Nodes for yesstillusingwindows2k

Death of a Partition