Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes Who shall keep watch over the guardians? Some may  think I write about this subject ( example ) too often, but frankly, I don't think I write about it often enough: Your server (or workstation) machine is important. Having it not boot up properly or operate normally  can often mean serious loss of income. That's real hard-earned dollars that you CANNOT GET BACK.  So why is it that so many Admins don't have a reliable backup and recovery strategy? Maybe we just think "it can't happen to me". Or maybe we're just plain stubborn and dumb! The single most important ingredient of a recovery strategy is the ability to restore a known good Registry.  Registry corruption often occurs when the machine is shutting down as OS changes are being written to the Registry. It can also occur if there is a network (TCP)  glitch or a power glitch. The bottom line is this: NOBODY IS IMMUNE TO REGISTRY CORRUPTION!  NOBODY! R...

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.   - Kurt Vonnegut I've written several times about the importance of having a serious backup strategy for your production web server, mostly about ways to backup the Registry. But there are a few other components of a good emergency recovery strategy that are important as well. A significant percentage of developers and webmaster / administrators run production sites on production machines and have no reliable backup strategy for the components of the machine that are critical to the successful operation of IIS. The mere fact that up to now you haven't had a production server blow up on you may actually have increased the statistical likelihood that you will experience such a failure! The three critical components to be protected and backed up -- with an easy path to restore them - are the Windows Registry , the IIS Metabase , and the .NET Framework machine.config file....

Here is an interesting experience. I don't know how this happened, but either through my careless deletion of an errant Registry key, or some other demon in the OS, I lost the COM+ subsystem when I rebooted Vista. This means you get errors like "Not enough storage space" and so on. Windows Restore is grayed-out, and all kinds of other goodness. Not only that, but the system won't recognize the Windows Vista DVD in the drive since it now thinks it's a blank CD. DOH! Unlike with previous OS versions, you cannot repair Windows Vista from the Boot CD unless there is either a System Restore point or you've backed up the system to another drive or other acceptable media. Since I had no backup and could not see "System Restore" I was sunk, right? That would leave only the option of a fresh install which would rename my old Windows folder to windows.old or something like that. Then, if I wanted my software, I'd have to boot into another OS (I've got ...