I very rarely discuss work related issues on this blog (if ever?) but here’s the story: I have several windows 2000 servers at work. This in itself should be enough of an albatross without having to deal with APC’s totally stupid implementation of JAVA in their Powerchute Business Edition software. This software monitors a bank of UPS devices in the rack and is supposed to initiate a graceful shutdown of the system if some criteria I set is met (power goes out for a long time, temperature too high, etc.). This is the ’short’ story of how they wasted about 4 hours of my (and my employer’s time)…I discovered that the installed Norton Corporate AntiVirus software was no longer enabled on one of the servers (a critical one storing and scanning the stripped off attachments of incoming emails), and that I couldn’t get to Windows Update. I spent some time thinking it was a problem with Norton, but of course I was thinking it was some kind of worm or virus, though for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly have gotten infected. However, there were no crazy connections from that machine being made to anywhere, and file sharing and email server was working fine. The machine was not particularly slow. I tried stopping the Norton service, but since it’s owned by SYSTEM I couldn’t do that anyway. I tried booting in safe mode to disable some services, and it wouldn’t allow me to stop *any* services! I discovered the Windows installation program was hanging when I tried to install a patch manually. What the??

I installed and ran Adaware using the altest definition on the machine. It found some tracking cookies and BroadcastPC (which I quarantined), but BroadcastPC would not cause the issues above. I ran a ZOTOB check and found nothing.

I found a post on TekTips that it might be that the APC Business Edition Software used to gracefully shutdown the system may be affected by a JAVA certificate expiration and that the certificate possibly expired on July 27th. Apparently after a reboot, services that load after the APC service may hang (now how often do we reboot the Windows servers, we’ll never notice that, right? - it only took two weeks in this case.)

I uninstalled the APC software, which was the affected version 6, rebooted the server into Safe mode, successfully disabled the APC ‘pbeserver’ service, and rebooted again. Turned out this *was* the problem. After uninstalling the APC software, the updates worked again and the Norton Corporate is functioning fine. How anyone (who doesn’t register their software would know to check for this is beyond me. There was no indication that it was related to APC at all.

Arrgh. I have a mind to write some nastigrams soon.