TROUBLESHOOTING

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Below is a sample of key learnings.  We maintain detailed troubleshooting sections within the client specific area of our web site.

General

Missing Floppy Disk drive in Windows Explorer

•  In Windows Explorer, clicking on My Computer displays all the hard drives but not the floppy disk drive.
  •  Root Cause: The system's BIOS has disabled the Floppy Disk drive
  •  Solution: Restart the computer and enter the BIOS to enable the drive

Windows NT

• If the # of CPUs, the SCSI controllers, and/or motherboard are significantly different, then a restored system may fail to boot with errors such as 'bad HAL.exe' and 'bad NTOSKRNL.EXE'
  •  Root Cause: The hardware specific operating system files don't match the computer you are using to restore with
  •  Solution:
    • Build a minimal version of NT on a secondary disk on the system being restored to get the correct set of hardware specific files.
    • Create a repair disk for this new alternate NT installation
    • Get or create a recent repair disk from the original system you about to restore (from the original hardware)
    • Restore the original NT system onto the C: drive of the restore hardware with the system state
    • Run the repair disk using the original hardware's repair disk
    • Copy the WINNT\System32 files (not subdirectories) from the alternate NT (hardware specific files matching the restore hardware)
    • Boot the restoration of the original system on the restore system hardware

Windows NT can't map a Windows 2000 drive

•  Attempting to map a drive from WinNT to a disk on Win2K fails
  • Root Cause: The Windows 2000 system may have been configured for only Windows 2000 systems (Native mode) and not mixed mode.
  • Solution: No known solution beyond rebuilding the Windows 2000 system.  This is a 'security' feature that is a one time configuration setting.

Windows 2000

•  Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and selecting the Task Manager produces a blank screen with just the Windows background.
  • Root Cause: A system service is consuming your system
  • Solution: Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and log out, then log back in again to restore the desktop.  Then right-click in a background section of the task bar and select Task Manager.  This access method will allow into the task manager so you can attempt to view and stop the offending process.

Internet Information Service (IIS)

•  Attempting to copy a project from InterDev to a website, produces this error.
  • Root Cause: The directory permissions are wrong on the web server's web site
  • Solution: Go into the IIS manager and set the directory's permissions and usage. Right-click on the web site, select Server Extensions and answer YES to tighten the security as much as possible for FrontPage websites. This will results in the following settings:
    • Default: Script source access, Read, No Write, No Dir Browsing, Scripts Only, Index this resource
    • Scripts, IIS Help, IIS Admin, IIS Samples, MSADC, PBServer, PBData, RPC, Printers, Exchange web: same
    • \cgi-bin, HTMLExamples, Images, JavaScript, _Layouts, _Private, _ScriptLibarary, Private, _Themes: same
    • _vti_cnf, _vti_log, _vti_pvt, _vti_script, _vti_text: same
    • _vti_bin: No script access, Read, No Write, No Dir Browsing, Scripts and Executables, don't index this resource

What are the appropriate settings for IIS?

• Website tab: Enable logging as W3C Extended log file format with hourly files
• Operators tab: administrators
• Performance tab:
  • Mid range (Fewer than 100,000)
  • No bandwidth throttling
  • No process throttling
• ISAPI Filters tab: none
• Home Directory tab:
  • A directory located on this computer
  • Script source access
  • Read
  • No writing or directory browsing
  • Log visits
  • Index this resource
  • Application settings:
    • Application name: Default Application
    • Execute Permissions: Scripts only
    • Application Protection: Medium (Pooled)
• Documents tab: index.htm
• Directory security tab:
  • Anonymous Access: Allow anonymous, no basic, no digest, Integrated Windows Authentication
  • Username: IUSR_Angus Password: IIS maintained
  • IP Address and Domain Restrictions: Grant Access, no entries in table
  • No server certificate at this time
• Server Extensions tab
  • Enable authoring
  • No version control, use customer performance, client scripting = Java
  • Don't inherit security settings