I just got back from a 6 hour adventure. One of my servers seems to have caught something like swine flu or more appropriately as I’m learning to call just “Windows”. It seems the network cards have all but died. Windows sees them, but after spending 4 hours trying to get any of the three NICs to work, I finally gave up by pulling the server out of the rack and driving it back to the office for a vaccination, er reformat.

This server had one job, to run a service I wrote and on top of that it was completely cut off from the internet. Initially I thought: “hmm maybe a virus that slipped in the network form another host?”. No such luck. If that had been the case I could have destroyed it in a matter of minutes and been on my way home. I’m bashing my head about this as this program would take about 2 weeks to rewrite for Linux. Should I allocate my time to rewriting this code that has run for over a year with no problems just to get around Windows? It’s a tough call. Maybe after a reformat, I’ll find out all the NICs really are dead…

Update:
There I go bashing Windows. I suppose I was just a little bit too tired writing this at 6 in the morning. After getting the server back to the office I plugged in an ethernet cable on all interfaces and wouldn’t you know it, they all work. Which means, I’m an asshole and Windows is the best after all. It’s now time to now look into the network equipment or cables.

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