First Blog Post

The first post always has to be the best, doesn’t it? Or at least be interesting enough to bring the dear reader back for a second go.

Better make it a good one then.

So what am i doing, well right now its Friday night, Ramsay is on the telly doing what he does best. But i cant enjoy that – no. Im sitting here with my laptop, trying to sort out a problem with a customers server. What’s worse is its a problem i caused.

As i just read in another blog post :

“Silly me – I forgot that computers are designed to keep us humble – the minute we get too confident in our own abilities they will do something to bring us right back down to earth.”

http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/04/22/857247.aspx

But it’s true. It doesn’t matter what the situation, the moment you sit back and think that everything is running smoothly something like this will pop up and ruin your weekend.

It started this morning, a customer phoned up to say that there emails were not working. The symptoms were that people were sending them messages and they were not arriving, a pretty standard support call. My Boss had decided to answer this one, and jumped head first into it with all the enthusiasm he could muster at that time in the morning. A snap diagnosis- let’s restart the exchange services he says “yeah the messages are stuck in the categorizer” knowing what i think i know, i suggest i take a look instead, before we do anything, by this i mean of course i logged in myself and ignored his suggestions.

I logged into the Trend CSM console to take a look at the Exchange Scanning – this produced ‘Error no.8’ whatever that is. I decided it wasn’t good and thought i would run the Exchange Troubleshooting assistant. This confirmed things were stuck in the categorizer but offered no more help than that. I attempted a  restart of the Trend Micro Messaging Security agent services, this didn’t go so well and the service hung in a stop pending state. I killed the process using Task Manager, and managed to restart it. A quick check in the message tracking logs – and mail was flowing again. Congratulations on a job well done. Not quite. I decided there CSM version was long over due for an upgrade, and resolved to upgrade to Trend Micros newest offering – Worry Free Business Security – Advanced. I have seen this said before – but it isn’t so worry free.

I couldn’t do a straight upgrade because the current version was 3.0 sp1 – the required version for an upgrade was 3.5+ so i downloaded 3.6 and attempted an upgrade to that. The upgrade went smooth enough, and in fact i have done a few of these upgrades before but today just inst my day. As during the upgrade of the Messaging Security Agent – i receive a fatal error. No more information than that.

Great. Ok ill do a manual install of the MSA, which seems to hang on ‘Validating Install’  not to worry i think – ill login quick when i get in and it will have finished. Things have now gone from bad to worse.

After two hours of ‘Validating’ nothing seems to be happening. The MSA is installed – because i can access it and configure it, and even get into the real time logs, but on the install progress it still saying validating install. I have to say at this point i have something of a problem with patience. SO i killed the msiexec.exe process, and up popped an error – problem installing EUQ (end user quarantine) but this can be installed manually from a location on the server. Ok good, one step closer to freedom…

Your probably all wondering why i didn’t leave it at that,  well i like to get things done, and didn’t think i would have the same problem again…. As i said earlier its one of those days.

I kick off the install of WFBSA and it more or less follows the symptoms of the blog post mentioned earlier. Fatal Error during install. Everything installed ok – except the MSA. Trying to do a manual install of the MSA generates a Fatal error during installation error, and that is what lead me to the blog post.

I followed the trend instructions to manually remove the EUQ, but i still cant get the MSA installed.

It’s half nine, i’m missing Ramsay, and i have to do the washing up before the next match on FIFA 09..

The backup is running now – i’ve disabled inbound email and ill pick this up tomorrow…. now, where’s that bottle opener i think i deserve a beer.