Solo Technology

There are tools and utilities that I carry around with me in the event that someday they might come in handy. There are sites whose URLs I seem to never forget for the same reason. Today, one of those sites came in very handy: Sysinternals.com and, in particular their tool Regmon, totally saved our bacon.

At the office, we’ve had a rough week with one of our applications that communicates with a vendor’s product via Web services. We had some bugs, found them and fixed them, but our app and their app weren’t communicating well at all. Of course, everything worked just fine in the development environment, but when it was time to run in Production it would go all pear shaped on us and blow up.

Thought we had it patched up after some long days and … it hosed up a demo today. Crap.

Got back into it this afternoon, digging hard. Finally managed to coax an error message from the SOAP fault that was hinting at permissions issues. Ok, now that’s odd. The install of the dev server and prod server are identical in (we thought) every way. Certainly the code is the same (ever spend a night diff‘ing a vendor’s code between two servers? Not fun).

Then we got bright enough to realize we could manually call the web services from that server. That got us a much more useful error as a result, hinting at registry permissions for, presumably, the .NET user account.

This was the point that I recalled Regmon. Downloaded it, unzipped it on the server and ran it. Puzzled out the filtering so I was seeing just the process I wanted to track (w3wp.exe) and 5 seconds later I saw the Registry Key it was after listed as “Not Found”. Ah ha! Fired up regedit, added the key and the problem was solved.

From stumped to solved in 5 seconds.

Now I have to figure out why that key disappeared. That’ll be tomorrow’s challenge I suppose.

3 Responses to “In Which Regmon Saves the Day”

1. Rich G. on October 12th, 2006 9:48 pm
   

   If you’d just use Linux you could have done that with a simple:

   :bash |hacky slash ;vii \n \n dev null |picklefitz {crappleshake}

   go linux!

   runs off giggling madly.

   (here’s hoping he never sees this lol

2. Rich G. on October 12th, 2006 9:50 pm
   

   ARGH!!!

   I can’t use a greater than/less than sign at all!!!

   I tried to use the [vox] tag to no avail and now the funny has gone south for the winter.

3. Chris on October 12th, 2006 9:54 pm
   

   And yet, I’m still laughing!

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