When you hear hooves…

So I just spent 3 hours troubleshooting something I thought I had inadvertently fouled up, in the process of trying to hack something into working.  I had messed with  some DNS settings and had even created a new DNS server, then I was having issues logging into the domain.  I was sure that what ever I had set up had interfered with the internal DNS connection to the Domain Controller (DC).  I walked back every step I had made, I flushed the DNS I tried deleting and re-adding the Network Interface Cards (NICs).  Nothing.  I found that it wasn’t just on logging in, but I couldn’t access the domain through the user manager or anywhere else.  Then I tried accessing the domain from something I hadn’t even touched.  Now we were getting somewhere… EVERYTHING was broken!  I felt so much better, because I knew that it wasn’t what I did.  Now I could go on and solve the bigger problem.

When I finally got around to looking at the DC, the problem was obvious, some process had gone haywire and it was out of memory, but a quick reboot and it was fixed.  After kicking myself for wasting so much time, I realized that there was a lesson here:

Sometimes when something goes wrong after you make a change, it was going to go wrong anyway.  So don’t always be sure that you are the one that is in the wrong.  AND… Some times those hooves really are zebra.

Photo Credit: (c)Tomo.Yun (www.yunphoto.net/en/)