Corrupt Configuration File

Today was hectic. I was at the location of the HSE training organized by Exterran an Oil and Gas company. Barely 30 minutes of my arrival, I received a call from my GM saying that he was not able to access his mail in the office. Now this came as a shock, because as at yesterday before I left the office, everything was just perfect, I also thought that my colleague will be in the office. I gave my colleague a call and guess what? He was not felling fine and said he will not make it to the office till about afternoon time. So I had to make my way back to the office with the Mopol escort and a 504 wagon that needs to be scraped. I got to the office around 10:30 am and to my surprise the whole office could not pop or send there mails, because the mail server was acting up. We make use of Kerio MailServer and KerioWinrout Firewall in the office.

Well what do I do? The first thing you start doing is try to get to understand the problem. I found out that users were not being allowed access into the mail server including the administrator, thats me. It was annoying. The funny thing with this problem was that the mail server was running on the Server, but because of the corrupt configuration file, the mail server was not allowing connection to it both from inside the Intranet and from the Internet. In other words, mails from outside our domain will be bounced back with a delivery report that the mail is undeliverable, becaue the mail server is not responding or does not exist.

So I had to tackle this problem from the bottom up. First I backed up all the configuration and user files from the mail server directory to a Network drive. Then next I tried repairing the mail server but this didn't work. What next? I uninstalled the mail server software completely, restarted the machine and then reinstalled it again. Now this seemed to have solved the problem, because it now contained a new configuration file and an empty user configuratin file. This posed another problem because the the Mail Server had to be reconfigured from scratch again plus i still had to create all user profiles and email addresses for the organization and I did not have that much time to play with, because users that needed there mails to get there jobs done were on my neck.

OK now the next step I took was to stop the Mail Server, then copied the configuration and user files from the external drive back to the installation directory of the Mail Server. Then I started the Mail Server and found out that the same problem was back again. It was then I knew that the configuration file was corrupt. The last step I took was to replace the present configuration file with one that I had backed up some months back. I restarted the Server and everything was back to normal again. Only complaints were that all mails that were sent from this morning till the time I resolved the problem had to be resent. Not a serious issue.

This was really an hectic day, but I came out victorious at the end of it. Network administrators are like doctors. They can be called upon at odd ours of the day depending on the organization you work for. So always be ready. And do not rush to find a quick way out of a problem, except you are doing it temporarily. Always try as much as possible to do the right thing, so you wont have to solve the same problem in the nearest future.

Ill give you an update of what my tomorrow looks like