Chris's questions

After a series of brown outs, our battery backup gave up and our server was powered off unexpectedly. Among other problems, this caused our WAS service to fail to start with error code 50. A lot of posts on the net reference error messages specifically relating to web.config or machine.config in the event log, but mine does not make any such reference.

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
    <System>
        <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-WAS" Guid="{524B5D04-133C-4A62-8362-64E8EDB9CE40}" EventSourceName="WAS" /> 
        <EventID Qualifiers="49152">5036</EventID> 
        <Version>0</Version> 
        <Level>2</Level> 
        <Task>0</Task> 
        <Opcode>0</Opcode> 
        <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> 
        <TimeCreated SystemTime="2015-08-20T12:04:11.000000000Z" /> 
        <EventRecordID>3025016</EventRecordID> 
        <Correlation /> 
        <Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" /> 
        <Channel>System</Channel> 
        <Computer>[redacted]</Computer> 
        <Security /> 
    </System>
    <EventData>
        <Binary>32000780</Binary> 
    </EventData>
</Event>

Notice the EventData section is empty except for the error code. I've tried restoring the default web.config and machine.config in both the %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\2.0.x and %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\2.0.x directories. I've also tried restoring the %windir%\system32\inetsrv directory from a previous backup. Nothing has worked so far.

Because this service wont' start, neither will any of the IIS related services among others. I can't even use the Exchange admin console or shell because they all use web services via IIS. Same with WSUS.

Please help!

Edit: Whatever is causing this is likely related to the fact that I can't do an appcmd.exe list site or appcmd.exe list config command either. Both return the following:

ERROR ( hresult:80070032, message:Command execution failed.
The request is not supported.
 )

I'm trying to add a custom domain to an Azure Web Site in standard mode. I've added the following DNS records:

@                     IN  A       168.62.48.183
www                   IN  CNAME   ua-roadtosochi.azurewebsites.net.
awverify              IN  CNAME   awverify.ua-roadtosochi.azurewebsites.net.
awverify.www          IN  CNAME   awverify.ua-roadtosochi.azurewebsites.net.

Azure keeps telling me that it cannot find my CNAME record. It has been several hours since I made this change. Is azure's internal DNS caching really that slow, or have I made a typo somewhere that I'm not seeing?

Edit: Several hours later, still no dice. This has got to be an issue with azure websites, no? I can't figure out what the hell is wrong.

At one point, on our SBS 2011 server, I had 2 IP addresses assigned to the primary NIC. This resulted in Windows adding a static entry for both IPs to the DNS when the DNS server started. This of course caused all manner of confusion, so I eventually removed the secondary IP address. However, every time the DNS server service is restarted, a static entry for the no longer present IP address keeps reappearing. Obviously, there's a reference to this IP somewhere that is causing this, but I have no idea where to look.

Why does Windows keep recreating this DNS entry for an IP that is no longer assigned to the machine?

I have a freshly installed SBS 2011 server that I need to configure for backup. I tried using the SBS backup configuration tool, but it didn't want to use anything but an external drive. Previously, with our W2K3 servers, I used NTBackup to back up the server to disk and then copied the backup files to a remote server on a regular basis. It doesn't appear this is possible with the built-in backup tools in SBS 2011. Am I missing something? What other options are there that won't cost an arm and a leg?

I have developed an app that will live at xyzdomain.com/app on our dedicated hosting setup. My client wants the app to be accessible at clientdomain.com/app. What options exist for transparently proxying or redirecting requests for clientdomain.com/app/whatever to xyzdomain.com/app/whatever such that the original URL is preserved for SEO purposes? In other words, the client doesn't want xyzdomain.com/app/whatever appearing on Google, but would rather it show up as clientdomain.com/app/whatever.

An ordinary frame page at the client domain is not acceptable here, as links within the frame pages would still reference xyzdomain.com.

Edit: It sounds like I want a reverse proxy setup, but is it common or even reasonable to setup a reverse proxy that forwards requests to another server not on the same network as the proxy server? Wouldn't that cause twice the latency and double the bandwidth usage?

Edit: Guys, I'm aware of the benefits of using a subdomain. That isn't possible here because the client only wants www.clientdomain.com to show up in search results. So yeah, no subdomain recommendations - it's not an option.

I'm working on a software package I'd like to be able to release as a virtual appliance. I'll be exporting the appliance from VirtualBox as a .ovf file. Outside of vmware server, are there any Windows host options that allow me to start the appliance when the host OS boots?

I manage several IIS 6.0 web servers for many different sites, most of which are set up in a load balanced configuration, which requires the same IIS admin procedure to be duplicated across N number of machines. Is there a centralized management tool I can use to do this? What are my options?

For whatever reason, the "mysql" database on my windows mysql installation has been deleted. I now have a mysql install that cannot start because the system database is missing, but I cannot find any documentation on recreating this database.

How do I recreate the mysql database (with users) on Windows?

We have a standard high-availability setup at a co-location facility that we host client programs on. For some programs, we host the DNS, but I find that setting up multiple zones manually can be tedious and prone to error. Is there an easy way to setup a standard zone file template and some how run sed, awk, or some other program to process a set of variables from another file and merge them with the template to create a zone file?

I thought about using m4, but I'm not well versed and it only seems ideal for merging one template at a time.

Ideally, I'd like to take a standard zone file template and merge it with a list like so:

domain1=ip1
domain2=ip2
domain3=ip1
domain4=ip1
etc...

Is there a way to script this?