When Stupid Persists

We all have our "moron for a day" events every now and then. Today belonged to me.

You see, we recently started allowing customers to pick hostnames for their $99 hosted SBS plans at Own Web Now. We call people up, tell them that their server will be up shortly and we ask them which hostname they prefered. You see, not everyone appreciates SERVER. Customer reasoned that because this is the center of their network the server computer name should be called NETWORK as well. It failed for the first monkey that did it. Then the second monkey supervised the first monkey. Then both monkeys turned over the box to me saying it "might be a hardware problem." Oh no, no siree. No piece of trash PCB from Taiwan is going to punk me, I will beat this box into submission.

Considering that I was fresh off the allnighter related to the Microsoft patching I just looked at the docs and did the same monkey procedure. Didn't notice the NETWORK part at all. Two reinstalls later (one from OPK other by text-based + F6) I finally pinged Mark from SBS PSS. Explained that I ran it in multiple ways, ran dcpromo manually, all the hardware and all the system logs checked out normally – the dang domain just isn't standing up! Why oh why? I still haven't told Mark what my server name was so it was a case of blind leading the blind for a little while. He suggested I get dcpromo.log and dcpromoui.log. So before looking at them (I know, brilliant) I first tinkered with the box to make sure I had USB working. 30 minutes later I got the file and decided to look at it first. Probably the first good decision of the day:

"Error – The promotion failed because the name of the local computer is the name of a predefined security identifier."

What the heck is my server name? Ohhh. Thats right, NETWORK. I'd say this is grounds for termination, not only because I'm an idiot but because I'm an MCSE on top of that. Holy crap, what was I thinking. NETWORK. NETWORK? How that didn't register through two reinstalls I will never know.

Update: Just FYI, the SBS installation wizard never warned me. It went through the full install and configuration and didn't even blink. Now that is not an excuse for my stupidity in naming the box NETWORK as client requested. The SBS setup actually went through all the way until it asked me if I wanted Exchange – to which it screamed that it didn't have a domain name.