The ISC BIND service terminated unexpectedly

[mwille64]

The Trial version was running smoothly until today when all of sudden the Configuration Manager became death slow. What I mean is that when launching the Configuration Manager on the FirstSpot server, it takes about 3-5 minutes for every page to load.

The FirstSpot server status (left panel) is reporting "Starting", which points to a problem in the start up process. Somehow the FirstSpot server seems to freeze during startup.

User all of sudden have full internet access (no login redirection) no access control at all.

I noticed two suspicious entries in the Windows Event Viewer:

a) System Error: The ISC BIND service terminated unexpectedly. In matter of fact it is not started. When attempting to start it manually I get another Event Viewer Entry saying the same thing.

b) Application Error: The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( Named ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: C:\Program Files\FirstSpot\dns\\etc\named.conf:52: zone 'logout': already exists previous definition: C:\Program Files\FirstSpot\dns\\etc\named.conf:36.

I checked named.conf and corrected the double entry. However, the doubled entry re-appears after a system restart.

If have one more Application Error entry which I'm not sure if it is related to this problem:

The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( Named ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: loading configuration: failure.

Dear PatronSoft Support, please note that today I actually purchased the FirstSpot server license !

[mwille64]

I managed to stop the FirstSpot server from within the Configuration Manager (took about 15 minutes because of the delayed reaction time).

After that, the Configuration Manager responded once again normally.

I suspect that if there is anything wrong during the start up process (status = STARTING...), the Configuration Manager tries to wait for the FirstSpot Server to finish its start up process. As the start up froze, the Configuration Manager waits (for each page) until it reaches a time out and then returns the requested page to the browser.

If the latter is correct, then this is a BUG and should be fixed.

After I managed to get the Configuration Manager back to normal I just did one change (the one I was trying to do in the first place when I encountered the problem):

I had previously disabled the FirstSpot DHCP server, because one of my private network routers was configured as DHCP server. I disabled that router's DHCP feature and enabled the FirstSpot DHCP server.

I set the Dispatcher and Redirector services from Automatic to Manual. Not sure if Manual is the default and I previously set them to Automatic or if Automatic should be the default.

After restarting the machine, everything started working normal again. Though I haven't yet run a complete test of the FirstSpot DHCP server. Will do this tomorrow and update this posting.

[alan]

You should ONLY configure "PatronSoft FirstSpot Dispatcher" service as automatic startup if you want to auto-start FirstSpot. All other Windows services should remain manual (except Apache, which is always setup as automatic startup regardless).

Refer to readme.rtf (Other issues -> point 5) for details.
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