Yep, your eyes have not been deceiving you, the server has been a sick puppy the last day or so. I recognize an invitation to GeekSpeak™ when I see one...

So there I was last evening, logged in remotely to the server, takin a gander and just generally lookin around. I check the virus scanner logs, fine, clean...but I remember as how that virus scanner is kind of out-of-date. So I go to Cy-DamanTec and run their little online scanner just for chuckles. Like this one:

The note said, "This could take a few minutes"...

Fifteen hours later I log back into the server after I had my morning coffee, to see that the little scanner had scanned a million files so far (I'll forego the obvious joke about 500,000 being messages from Tom), and found ten count 'em ten viruses! Holy Moley!

I let it run a while longer, got bored, and aborted it, because I wanted to find out about those 10 infections. Displayed the scan report and saw that the 10 infections were just viruses attached to email in my mail server's queue. I doubt there's a day that goes by but that aren't a lot of viruses in the email queues.

Well.

And yet, something was still wrong. The server was still dog slow, as you might have noticed. Poked and prodded all day, made the server say "aah", tried this and twiddled with that. To make a long tedious story mercifully short, I hit on MSMQ as a likely culprit. Mainly because there were 93,000 files backed up in its queue folder, and since the Message Queue service queues messages, and these stalled message files were in fact produced by the operation of the HabitableZone BBS software, it may in truth be not all that far from the mark to say that perhaps half were injected into the system by Tom. But I digress.

In other words, the server had a clogged pipe, and my job was to snake it out so that messages could drain smoothly again.

Those messages were stubborn little buggers, hiding in a folder protected by Windows as "special" and clinging to the walls like...well, you know the sort of stuff that clings to the walls of pipes. I'll give you special...Anyway I found a couple of little command line utilities for MSMQ, and used one to create to create a batch file with a one line per stalled message with a command to delete each one individually, 93,000 lines, 3.5 megabytes. That's The World's Largest Batch File I was talking about somewhere around here.

Unfortunately, that didn't work.

Something about security descriptors, I dunno. Time was a wasting, so I decided to go nuclear and uninstall and reinstall MSMQ. Jiggle the handle, in other words. And hope that it goes without a hitch and doesn't lobotomize the server instead.

Well, looks like it worked, that brand-new MSMQ pipe looks all shiny and new and smoooooth. Downright purty!

The messages must flow!