I'm Not Kidding. I really have no life

Anyone who really knows would nod in total agreement and understanding at this title without hesitation.  While most people arrive at each Friday with the hope and excitement of a weekend and promises of something exciting, or even mildly interesting, to look forward to… I see Monday on the horizon.  I don't go on vacations.  I don't have any serious hobbies, well, besides an occassional jog or bike ride.  Other than that, I sit and read or write program code.

So, here it is on a Saturday night.  Clear skies and stars beginning to pop out.  And I'm building a VM to prepare for swapping out a flaky AD domain controller.  It's the only DC for my network, which although violates my own strong convictions about redundancy and failover planning, it is what it is: a single point of failure.  What's worse is that I broke it.

It works from a AD services standpoint.  And SP1 seems to have fixed that annoying problem I've had to deal with in the Server Manger console that puked up an error every time I tried to access "Roles" or "Features".  Feh.  All the fixes I'd tried before that worked for a few hours at most, then the problem would return.  SP1 seems to have been the real fix.

But what I "broke" was WSUS.  You see, when you configure WSUS to maintain a local updates cache, and you swap out the drive which contained that cache without doing proper due diligence and preparation, well, it leaves WS08 R2 unable to do ANYTHING with it.  I had a 500 GB IDE drive stuffed in the server and it was running out of space, so I bought a 1TB SATA drive and swapped it out.  Then I tried to get WSUS to use it.  Ha ha ha ha …. so unfunny.  You can't even uninstall it after that happens.  Well, you can (by using the vice grip approach with MSICUU), but it still won't allow you to reinstall it.  Take my advice, and don't do that kind of transplant surgery without doing it right.

So, my hair-brained plan is to stand up and join a new DC, transfer the FSMO roles, reload the original DC and switch it all back.  Maybe.  I'm still dealing with how to address some technical issues with DNS, and GPO settings, but whatever.  It's not like I have anything else going on. 

So, if you're sitting at a friend's house, or at a bar, movie theater, pub or eatery, and even the slightest whisp of thought passes your brain suggesting you lead a boring life… think again.