I want to write something non-technical today to try and touch a different subject all sysadmins face today.
Let’s take a trip to the wild side of being a sysadmin: The side,I like to call the: “Zen and Frustration” side of the job. (No, I’m not high and “yes” it’s late and I’m jotting this down as we go…)
People around me who know I’m a sysadmin always think that this line of work only involves exact science, bits and bytes, ones and zero’s. Of course I won’t deny that these trades plays a big part but…

what I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that in my experience, the larger and more complex your environment gets, keeping your servers alive becomes more of an art than exact science. Other skills like creativity, intuition, healthy portion of distrust(=genetics) and some spidey-sense almost become a necessity in the job.

What also factors in, is the amount of layers you have in your environment because as each layer is supposed to add more capability and power to your environment it also adds at least two other things:
1 – increased complexity
2 – another layer of bugs (not an opinion but just a fact of software)
In our environment we use a combination of Terminal Server, App-V (actually Softgrid because it’s still running on 3.x), Citrix and PowerFuse. So when you encounter issues your search area is also increased tremendously which brings me to the frustration side of the job.
I sometimes miss the days of VMWare ESX 2.x or Metaframe XP. My instructors in that time always taught that installing patches was relatively safe…which it was. You installed a Rollup pack and the issues mentioned were fixed….end of story.
What drives me nuts these days is that hotfixes and rolluppacks are supposed to fix 5 things but at the same time breaks 15 other things which you only discover when your users are working and using function XYZ!

I’m currently working on a issue where a random Terminal Server will just “freeze” including the sessions on it. It doesn’t crash, you CAN ping it, browse to \\servername\c$ but cannot login through the console or through RDP, so no dumps, no eventviewer errors no nothing. No clues are left behind. Can happen to any server at any time of the day…..or not…happy hunting.!
I decided to try my luck at Microsoft. So I went to the advanced search support site and typed in: kbwinserv2003postsp2fix which gives you all the hotfixes for Windows 2003 that have been released to the general population after SP2. Hmmm…over 200 hotfixes to choose from how nice!
Okay, lets park that query for now and go over to Citrix, I heard that R05 contains a hotfix that might be related. Let’s check it out:
“Under certain circumstances, Terminal Services becomes unresponsive, causing the server to stop accepting connections“. Well unsure what those “certain circumstances” are but we might be on to something here.
Lets check the citrix support forum to see if any admins are being frustrated by R05. Oh man…are you kidding me, Citrix breaks the Custom CMC Administrator function in R05 (again!) It looks like Citrix keeps forgetting people actually use that feature more often than not. (as we do)

Okay, no Citrix hotfix in sight that patches that newly introduced feature in R05 so back to the 200+ fix-list from Microsoft.
I saw 2 hotfixes that maybe of interest: kb932375 and kb935926 which funny enough fix the exact same files. I’m going to put these on my testserver to see if basic functionality stays intact and after that I’ll throw them on a couple of production servers to see what happens.
To put an end to this shameful non-technical dodgy blogpost, I’ll mention one last fix I found:
For all my fellow sysadmins who’ve had an application crash in the past with an “access violation” (I mean who hasn’t seen this!), don’t worry any longer…I’ve found a hotfix, better yet…the golden hotfix from Microsoft. Take a look at it here…don’t you just love your job as much as I do ?!

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