Server Upgrade
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In July 2003 a hardware upgrade kills the Nancy Street Windows 2000 Server

Server Upgrade

From 2001 to 2003 the Nancy Street server was a 1997 vintage Pentium 200MHz with an Intel Venus motherboard and 64MB of SDRAM. This was a "hot" machine when it was first built, but 5 years later this grossly underpowered machine finished-up running Windows 2000 Server, the .NET Framework, two network cards, a shared ADSL connection, an IIS web server (with a 2GB/month download average) and SQL Server. The suffering machine just managed to run all of this, but it would take about 15 minutes to boot and the average response time to a mouse click was 10-20 seconds.

On Sunday 13-July, an early morning trip to the computer "swap meet" exchanged AU$350 for a KT-400 Gigabyte motherboard, a 2.0GHz AMD processor and a 512MB chip of DDRAM. The server was given a "heart lung transplant" and the new parts were installed with the help of our friend Rob Podosky, who finished the job within an hour (it would have taken me about 10 times as long).

The server is plugged back in and booted. Windows 2000 Server stops at a blue screen and says the boot device is inaccessible. Two hours later, after trying every trick imaginable, including safe modes and emergency recovery, Windows will not boot and the error does not change.

Windows 200 Server is reinstalled over the previous copy and the server boots perfectly. It takes about 10 hours to get the server back the way it was, with the ADSL sharing, patches, mail server, customisation and miscellaneous tweaks. Luckily I had taken great care to separate the applications and settings from Windows whenever possible, so not much vital information was lost.

In the "mainframe days" (on Fujitsu FSP/MSP and IBM MVS), the operating system and applications were strictly separated from each other, so a complete new operating system could be dropped-in faster that it now takes to reinstall Windows.

Some Explanations

I posted into newsgroups and asked a few friends why Windows 2000 Server refused to boot on the new hardware. It turns out that I was too hopeful and optimistic to expect to survive such an attempt. It seems that Windows creates a specific and customised HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) early during setup that is tied to the hardware and any attempt to perform a "heart lung transplant" like I did is doomed to fail. As an ex assembly programming specialist, I find such a design inconceivable. However, I'm guessing that if I knew more about the low-level design of PC components then I might write this whole miserable episode off as being a testament to the lack of strict standards.

The following pop-up replies to my queries give sobering insight into what happened:

Tony's comments
Newsgroup reply #1
Newsgroup reply #2

More Problems

After the server was reconstructed and working, the follow transpired:

• The development client PC was upgraded to the .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003. After 4 days of terrible suffering it was found that AdSubtract 2.52 altered the HTTP UserAgent attribute by appending user registration information, thereby causing the ASP.NET 1.1 rendering engine to think that the browser was "downlevel" and all controls displayed with the blank default width and height.
• After 8 more hours of suffering it was discovered that the ASP.NET SmartNavigation attribute caused page redraws to generate IE rendering errors on certain Web Forms.
• Upgrading from Infragistics V1 to V2 is a delicate and frustrating process, especially if you prefer to copy all of the scripts and images to your local project to simplify deployment and avoid the need for other virtual directories.
• IIS on the server was finally modified to use Host Headers to redirect incoming requests for the orthogonal COM and NET domains to different local web site directories.

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