Customer issue

A customer reported an issue with their Amicus PDA environment.

Amicus PDA is basically a mobile version of our Amicus point of sale software. There was Windows Server 2003, IIS and SQL Server 2005 running merge Replication. Client was receiving 503 Service Unviable Error, upon further investigation this error was logged in the event log. 'Test Pool' is invalid. If it remains invalid when the first request for the application pool is processed, the application pool will be disabled. The data field contains the error number.

I found in IIS that the application pool was disabled, so I enabled the pool but the application still wouldn’t launch. As a temporary solution, I created a new application pool and gave it administration privileges.

As the client’s were now operating I could look further into the problem. Firstly, the server had run out of space. Secondly, what I found most interesting the user account that the application pool was running as was disabled, why this was disabled I wasn’t sure. I re-enabled the account and changed the web site to use the correct application pool, issue resolved.