Under Duress

At the last minute and at great expense, the Frobozz Magic Blog company (How many people will get that reference...?) is proud to present... My blog.

For quite some time I've been intending to start a blog, if for no other reason than to have an easily accessible repository of useful bits and pieces that I can get to from pretty much anywhere. Call it an information wallet, a portable brain or perhaps auxiliary memory, basically a place to keep all that information I can't remember just at the time I need to remember it. I'd get to it one day - if, in a moment of spare time, I could just remember to do it.

But my good friend and colleague, Brad Turner - with an evil grin on his face (I know that for a fact, as I was sitting next to him when he did this...) - has forced my hand, well both hands, actually, since I use both when typing... His recent post regarding an issue we were troubleshooting has an embedded link to what was my non-existent blog. So out of fear of Internet wide humiliation, I was forced to blog my first blog in the blogosphere.

So here's the actual blog part of this blog post...

Since most of you probably got here from the link on Brad's post, I'll not rehash the entire situation. But if, by chance, you happened upon this post via some other circuitous route, here's the basic summary:

While building a decidedly kick-ass identity management solution for a client, we ran across a situation with one of the servers in which it appeared a bit unresponsive at times and, in general, just didn't behave in a fashion similar to it's fail-over brother in a far away data center, despite being built as a virtual twin. The main symptoms were lethargic application startups and curious memory errors delivered by MIIS. After numerous troubleshooting attempts, staring stupidly at the monitor and asking questions along the lines of, "What the...?" we did finally figure out the problem.

In a nutshell, the problem was that the system was trying to verify certificates associated with certain applications, but that particular server did not have access to the Internet. So applications, in this case SQL Server Management Studio, take some time to startup because they're waiting for the timeout in trying to access the Microsoft Certificate Revocation List at http://crl.microsoft.com.

In the case of MIIS, the delay caused MA extension timeouts and seemingly unassociated out of memory errors.

There are a few ways to mitigate this issue. We chose, at least for now, to disable certificate verification through the advanced properties in Internet Explorer.

All of the details, including Event Log entries, etc. are in Brad's post, so if you haven't been there yet, go now.

Go on...

That's all I have to say for now...

No reason to hang out here anymore...