18/06/2012: Slow Response and Printing Problems
Apologies, but today a different and unrelated problem resulted in the same symptom for some users - i.e. slow response of applications on the platform and printing problems.
A hard disk failed on our Primary Domain Controller (PDC) server. The RAID configuration, which is installed on all servers on the platform, ensured that no data was lost, but the PDC was slow to respond until we were able to identify this as the cause of the problem.
We have now promoted a Backup Domain Controller (BDC) to the role of PDC so that we can take the faulty PDC offline to repair or replace the failed hard disk.
To make matters worse, we believe that there was also a recurrence of the LINX problem that we all experienced a few weeks ago (see previous article). We and probably many users suffered a dropped connection to our remote desktop sessions. Thankfully this was brief and we were soon able to resume our investigations.
It was extremely rare and unfortunate that these three very different issues occurred in such close succession, all with the same symptom of slow application response and printing problems.
Things tend to happen in threes and we should be able to look forward to a stable platform for some time.
Thank you for your patience.