ColdFusion Muse

Solving Win2k Service Startup problems

Ever have the problem of a service not wanting to start on boot-up? Maybe you have to manually start your FTP or World Wide Web publishing service after every reboot of your server. We had this problem about a year ago on one of our servers. It has to do with the start order of the services that depend on each other. The WWW and FTP service in Windows both depend on the IISAdmin service. If it is unable to start in a timely manor, one or both may fail. The symptom will be that IISAdmin is running, but either FTP or the WWW service is not. This masks the actual problem - which is that there is an internal dependency that is either not specified or is not reporting back to the start-up routine. Coldfusion compounds the problem because it depends on some of the same internals as IISAdmin - so the problem often rears its head after installing CF or some other AP server or filter using IIS. To solve the problem you make the Coldfusion service "Depend" on the IISAdmin service so that it won't start unless IISAdmin is running. Then you make www (and or ftp) "depend" on the Cold fusion application server service before it starts. This outstanding blog entry by Dan Switzer shows how to make that happen.