Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Case of the Missing Vdir

Yesterday, for most of the day, this blog site was down.  It was throwing an error that essentially said that my virtual directory was missing.  It was a bit stranger than that, but pretty close.  I have not been the biggest fan of my current provider.  I feel like their tech support is lacking and they are missing key tools that other provider's offer for self-management.  As an example, there is no way short of calling tech support to get a vdir created.  That seems pretty rudimentary to me.

After demanding more than a simple "it's working now" answer, I found out that an 'orphaned application cleaner' was run on their servers which managed to remove my vdir as an IIS application.  When I finally noticed it (of course they didn't notice), it only took about an hour to get it restored.  The part that really peeved me was the explanation from them.  It was written in the same manner as most passive voice, it's-not-my-fault prose that we have come to expect from our government.

A virtual directory for the blog folder had been created. However, it was not configured as an application in IIS.

This seems eerily similar to how the government describes casualties (note the passive voice that deflects responsibility):

3 soldiers lives were lost yesterday in a roadside explosion.

By contrast, I would have readily accepted this explanation:

We screwed the pooch.  Yesterday we ran a poorly tested application on the production servers that wiped out a number of our customer's applications.  Sorry about that, it won't happen again.

Well, that is really wishful thinking... I suppose.

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