When Updates Go Wrong

This Friday evening, lastnight, I had some time to myself and decided to do some care and feeding of my various personal servers: a Windows Server 2003 box, a Mac OS X box, and my beloved Cisco ASA 5505. Only one of the boxes made it out of the OS updates unscathed: the ASA. The reward for my dilligence is that I've driven 130 miles this evening to go to where the boxes are physically housed to do what I can to resurrect them. The best part comes when I'm pulling off of the Interstate and pull onto Main Street and see literally a dozen firetrucks parked in front of the building where the boxes are hosted. Oh you can imagine my panic.

After I got over the initial shock of seeing the firetrucks, and realized that they were fighting a house fire across the street from my hosting facility, I took on the OS X server. When the display came up it was sitting at a text-based Darwin login prompt. That's new territory for me. Being an old *nix jockey though, I wasn't daunted until it wouldn't take my input from the keyboard. I rebooted and it came back VERY VERY slowly, but never finished booting. I'm resigned to the fact that this soldier may be down for the count. I can't even get into the OpenFirmware... I see the display flash, and it chimes (POST), but no love. :-( I'll see if the local Mac Doctors can do anything to save this poor chunk of silicon.

Next up: the Windows Server 2003 box. This box SEEMS to be operating correctly, but Terminal Services won't respond on it. Its like its not even listening on tcp/3389. Being a Windows box, I gave it another reboot and after a bit it came back and Terminal Services appears to be running JUST FINE. Damn Windows boxes. I swear. It wouldn't be so awful except this behemoth takes a day to reboot!!! Grr... SO even a second reboot, to verify that the first was in fact the resolution, took me about an hour. I'm not kidding, this thing is a dog. All is well now.

...so, the NEXT time I plan on doing updates, I'm probably going to be more than a little gun-shy.