* * * * *
The server platform that can not run unattended
A customer calls up, and asks if we can reboot his colocated server because
he can't “PCAnywhere [1] in.” Windows box. Of course. “It's
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com, in a tall tower case,” he said.
“So all I need to do is hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and shutdown then, right?” I wanted
to make sure here.
“Yes.”
So I go into the server room, and hook up the crashcart to the system in
question. The few mice I try don't work, but the keyboard does, so at least I
have that much going for me. The screen is, for the most part, blank, and the
task bar at the bottom looks like it has an outbreak of the Chicken Pox. I
hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, a few windows flash, then the infamous “I can't stop this
task” message box comes up.
By now, I can see that there are at least a few dozen message boxes from some
application complaining that it can't send email and to try again. And it's
this application that Windows is having difficulty killing, since the message
boxes are apparently keeping the program alive until I click Okay to dismiss
it.
And each message box is backed up with its own process.
Which is filling up the task bar with so many programs, making it look like
the aformentioned Chicken Pox.
So for a solid five minutes I'm there alternating between killing tasks from
the task-killing message box (which doesn't seem to go away) and hitting Okay
on the “I can't send email” message boxes, and I swear the number of tasks is
not decreasing. I'd like to shut down this server cleanly because, well …
it's Windows (turns out it's Windows NT 4.0 release 1381—circa 1996 I
believe).
But there's no way I'm going to play button-monkey to Windows, and I hit the
Big Red Switch [2].
It's a server! I shouldn't have to hit Okay on a message box to get it to
continue. It should run unattended.
Bloody Windows.
[1]
http://www.symantec.com/pcanywhere/
[2]
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/Big-Red-Switch.html
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