For anyone who stumbles across this looking desperately for a fix.  If it is in relation to a service like SMTP in IIS, the short answer is:

Go to Computer Management --> Services and check to be sure the service is not "disabled".

The long winded or winding story of the is answer is below the fold.

Here’s a bedtime story certain to keep you terrified… at least if you plan on becoming a computer geek that is.

You know what makes computers so damned annoying? The fact that they can not present a decent error message.

You know what makes google searches so annoying? The fact that everyone (including Microsoft) tells you to monkey around with the registry every time there is a problem.

We’ve been doing quite a lot of network tinkering lately. All because we dropped one line provider and picked up a different one. It will save us money, but the reconfiguration of a network (even our small one) is a nightmare.

At the same time we had to update our email software.

Oh joy. What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything it seems. Email servers are notoriously bitchy to work with. They are touchy. They have a bazillion little boxes to check or uncheck. They have security holes - those that have been found and patched, those that haven’t been found but are still there. They like things configured in a very particular way or they just don’t work. We don’t run Exchange server but it doesn’t really matter - all of them have huge issues. The fact that email works at all is a complete miracle.

One of the cute little tricks with email servers is that you can create a file on a mainframe computer, send it to an emailpickup box on a windows server and if the header text has the fields correct, it looks exactly like an email and can be delivered as such. You just need to turn on the SMTP service on the server. SMTP means Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (protocol… heh I feel like I’m in an episode of 24).

Our problem - when the email software was updated, the SMTP service stopped. Stopped deader than a doornail. It refused to turn back on. Trying to start it gave a cute little error message that meant nothing at all. Something along the lines of “Sorry can’t start” “Ok”. I mean c’mon! It could at least say “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”..

Of course the next step is to check the event log to see what it says. We had:

Event ID 5782 Source NETLOGon

Dynamic registration or deregistration of one or more DNS records failed with the following error: No DNS servers configured for local system. Data: 0000: 7c 26 00 00

What? A DNS error? All we did was update the mail server! It has nothing to do with DNS. Could updating mail server software change the logon for the domain? I don’t think so. But where else does one start?

So I went looking and looking all over the net. If you read the comments on the linked error page you will see that people are all over the place with this. And every one of them talks about jickjacking the registry. None of the other pages I found was any better. Including Microsoft’s troubleshooting page.

No. No way am I going to go messing with the registry when the error is making no sense.

My boss and I spent hours working on this. We rebooted it. You have to drag my boss kicking and screaming to the restart button. He hates rebooting. Therefore, this was a landmark decision on his part.

When that didn’t work, thinking it might possibly be a domain problem, we demoted the mail server and recreated the domain. But first we did it on the back up machine to be sure it would work… it did. We made it a stand alone domain with its own DNS.

Nothing - dead dead dead. Had it been within arms reach I would have smacked it. Would have hurt my hand, but would have felt better. Either that or made stew of it.

To get the work mail moving we had to point the mail server to the backup SMTP server. That got us the mail from the mainframe (all the job reports that we use). Yes, it worked, but it brought a deluge of spam with it. Lovely. The spam filter was bypassed.

Hours of work - no change. My boss continued to work on it later into the night. Because the spam filter was being bypassed he had to stop the spammers from using our server as a relay or everyone would blacklist our email. Yet more time gone.

Next day I started searching again. For the life of me I don’t remember where I found it, but someone had posted yet another registry “fix”. Basically it was to go in to the local machine SMTPSVC and change the service start type from 4 to 2.

No, I’m not going to change the registry. But I did go look at it. I then tried googling around to see what those numbers meant. I couldn’t find anything then because I didn’t search for the right thing. Once again proving if you don’t look for exactly the correct thing - you get crap results. Here is a page with the numbers and meanings.

After about 5 minutes of searching, I had one of those V-8 duh moments. Service… it’s a service…stupid! Go check the services in Computer Management! Sure enough the service had been disabled. How? No idea. As soon as I reset it to automatic everything started right back up.

If the error message had read “SMTP service is disabled” we could have had it fixed in less than a minute. But because the error message was completely bogus (and it never occurred to me that the service had simply disabled itself). I wasted hours of time.

This was only one of the many things that have gone wrong this week while we have been rewiring and revamping the system. If someone stumbles across this and it helps them - most excellent. I figure by now I’ve put most all the non-tech people into a coma from which they will never recover. At least I get this out of my head.

Posted by: Teresa in Ho-Hum at 11:39 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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