The Rush
There?s just something about getting into the thick of a technical problem that gets your blood pumping, your mind all abuzz and your energy flowing. You pick up the phone, you hear the problem and think to yourself, ?Aw man, how am I ever gonna resolve this? It?s just not possible.? So you go about the usual suspects and pray your brain will catch up with your words so you will have something earth shattering to bring about to save the user?s day. Man?I live for this shit!
Interesting issue on tonight?s episode of ?Stump the Princess?. A call came in from the IT department in one of our other offices (don?t ask why). I pick up the phone, hear the issue and immediately crumple. The tech explained their user can?t connect to the mail server through his mail client. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, here?s the fuckin rub: the user connected to the domain with no issue and could browse about to his heart?s content, the account was in good standing and we could even ping the server via IP & name, so we had to throw those theories out the window. What the hell was going on?
The machine had recently been victim to a lazy hard drive, so a new one was called to action. It had been imaged and transferred over, so it was quite possible that was the source of our lil bug. We tooled about, flushing the DNS and performing other house cleaning functions to narrow things down. After removing the machine from the domain and adding it again, we discovered it was taking a more than reasonable time to populate into the mix and play well with others. Hmmmm?
Alas, The Brain came up with the final and quite simple solution. I was impressed, yet again. Care to guess what that solution was? Lunch goes to the individual who can guess it correctly?come on, what do you have to lose?
Comments
Allright, I'll give it a shot. There's a couple of possibilities, actually. Usually, a long delay in logging in (or populating in) is a DNS problem - after about 5 mins, Windows gives up and resorts to NetBIOS/WINS instead
1) Clients primary DNS is messed up
2) Some tool has been adding DHCP servers to the network, or accidentally reused a machine name
3) NetBIOS and DNS name disagree
If your logon actually happens fairly fast, and only *your* machine is not visible for *others*, it's probably #3 - #1 would cause the login to delay, too
I'm sure there's plenty of other choices. That's why I don't work in IT :)
Posted by: groby | March 4, 2004 9:12 AM
Too much porn?
Posted by: vince | March 4, 2004 11:44 AM
My father's machine at home, running XP failed to connect to a new DSL Router that I bought him. The icons for the network adapters would not appear. I fixed it by uninstalling the network adaptor drivers and reinstalling them. or...
Did you swap out the network card? or...
Did you swap network cables?
None of those should like they would be writing about, so I imagine they are wrong, but I want a free lunch!
Posted by: Alex | March 4, 2004 5:21 PM
No, no and no, although Groby, you're close in concept.
I'll give it another week and see if anyone gets it before I share the answer.
Posted by: Princess | March 6, 2004 10:15 AM