Filed Away

I’m a Windows Administrator by profession and there’s always a healthy, if sometimes strident, level of competition with the UNIX side of the house. Recently we had a 2003 server go black on us. The server was up and functioning, but any attempt to RDP or logon to the console was met with a black screen. You could tab around and get things just right and it would let you in then it was okay, but it was a pain in the butt and scheduled for a rebuild.

Now mind you we search Google and the knowledge base and the Technet forums and found nothing. Then one of the Unix guys reveals an obscure little article where it appears when a server runs out of space sometimes a 2003 server will loose it’s color settings and default to black. Remote to the registry, open HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Colors and lo-and-behold all the settings are all 0.0.0.  Go to a working server, get a copy of the key, import it and PRESTO! all is well.

I’m going to rebuild it out of spite:).

Okay, no actually I’m going to rebuild it because lots of people who had no business farting around with a server had their hands in it trying to fix it and who kn ow what they broke in the process, but still, it’s a nice piece of information to have in your book.