What a day.

Well, today started out fairly normal. I got to work early and enjoyed my coffee as I checked my email and such. It was brought to my attention that the server wasn’t being very responsive and I remembered that the cash on hand worksheet hadn’t been emptied out since I was in the hospital (turns out since Aug 10th) so it was getting quite large. It was like 8:00 so I had about half an hour to get everything running again so I figured I would clean out the worksheet and reboot the server and all would be well. Boy was I wrong.

I waited for the scanning coordinator to finish activating the sale items for this week and then I set to work emptying out the worksheet. Because it was so large it was taking a long time to save. Eventually it seemed to freeze altogether so I decided in the essence of time to just do a hard reboot on the server and worry about the worksheet later. The reboot took for ever and then I started getting error messages and I knew it was going to be a long day. Turns out the drivers for the TCP stack somehow got corrupted and when I rebooted the corrupted versions replaced the good ones and now the network interface wouldn’t load. A server doesn’t do much good if it can’t get on the network.

By this time it was about 8:30, time to open so we did and I frantically tried to get the network interface to come back up. The registers are designed to run when the server is down, but two things happen when they are offline

1) Credit cards, debit cards, and food stamps do not work, because the processing software runs on the server therefore the server must be accessible.

2) Any changes made to the item file since the last end of day (which was last night) are not downloaded to the registers so although the AD was activated this morning the registers knew nothing about it since they were now offline running on last night’s item file.

So immediately we had two issues. We couldn’t take any cards that needed PIN numbers (food stamps and debit) because we can run credits in the office after we are back up and running, but we can’t do anything with pin numbers, and we needed to be aware of what was supposed to be on sale and manually enter the sale price since the item wouldn’t ring up properly.

In the mean time I had called Dave to get him in to the store early. While I waited for him, I started poking around and found some references to some files that made me believe that we had a virus on the system. Nod32 had cleaned the files but I was starting to think they had corrupted the TCPIP stack. Dave got there around 9:30 and we started pursuing our options. We were quickly realizing we didn’t have many. Without the TCPIP stack, nothing having to do with the network would work. We thought about doing a repair install of server 2003, but were fearful that it would hose our ScanMaster install. Not something I particularly wanted to do. By 11:00 I had realized that we were not going to get this thing fixed and called our credit card providers to see what our options were. I was hoping to get a stand alone terminal so we could at least process debit and food stamp cards in some form or another. My contact there started working on that and I called the register people to see what our options were for the server. By 1:30 the guy with the credit cards got back to me with a work around that would allow me to put the processing software on another computer and tell the registers to go there to do their credit/debit/food stamp transactions. I set to work getting it installed and reconfiguring the registers and by 2:00 we were processing credit cards again. Yea!

In the mean time ScanMaster had called back and we were about ready to do an install when we realized that I was never given a copy of the pervasive server install :(. The only way it was getting fixed was to get it to Pittsburgh. Dad and I discussed it and he decided he would just drive it there since he could be there in 2.5 hours and UPS wouldn’t get it there until tomorrow. About 4:30 they called me and said that they had my server and that he was going to get the item file off of it so that I could grab it and put it on the registers. By 5:30 I had the item file (poor item file had to go to Pittsburgh and back in the same day) and I had it on the registers. Surprisingly it worked! Now the AD is activated and the prices are correct!

They think they will have the server done tomorrow morning and someone is going to drive it back to us. So we should be back up and running by tomorrow night. All in all it could have been a lot worse and we certainly learned a few things from it. I will be purchasing a new computer to be used in the office so that the server can remain a server and that’s all it will be. I will also be putting a router that can filter the internet in so that people can’t get to sites that they aren’t supposed to, or in some cases, to the internet at all, as I’m fairly certain the virus I was seeing was one of those pop-up deals that tells you your computer is infected, only when you click on it, it infects you. Sneaky. Anyhow, that means someone was on the internet and was taken to one of those sites. Guess I get to put a stop to that.