DHCP Server Service will not start & Generic Host Process for Win32 Services crash on log in

I ran into a Microsoft problem today that should not have happened. You would think that moving a server to a new UPS would be a straight forward procedure with no issues. Not this time. I'll give some quick background on the server...It is a Windows Server 2003 SP? 32-bit Domain Controller. It has DNS, DHCP, File Sharing, Print Sharing, etc running on it. I scheduled the down time and shut down the server. All is going well. We get the power cables all situated and turn the server back on. Once up I get the dreaded "One or more services failed to start" message.

Ok. First thing I want to do is check the Services snap-in in Administrative Tools. I log in as the domain admin and get an application crash window that says "Generic Host Process for Win32 Services has encountered a problem and needs to close". Great! This program uses svchost.exe for whatever the hell it does. I don't feel like exploring that right now.

Alright fine, whatever. So I check the services. The first thing that catches my eye is that the DHCP Server Service is not running. After varifying that this infact was being used by the network PCs I tried to manually start it and it failed. Unfortunately I don't have the exact error message but Google returned 1 result, which was useless by the way. Svchost errors usually signify a virus or malware but I had a hunch.

The next thing after the always useful event viewer search...exageration...was to pursue my hunch. I opened Add or Remove Programs, checked the Show updates box and sure enough a series of Windows Updates automatically installed themselves on 6-11-09. Ok so I start at the top of the list. I get a warning when removing it stating that the following applications may not work afterwards. I cancel and go down the list until I find the first one. kb970483. I removed that just fine. Then I found the next one. kb969805. It then prompted me to reboot. I did that and everything magically began working.

In the mean time my co-worker had already created a new DHCP Service with a fresh Scope to use in case any clients' lease expired. At least now we have a backup in case any more Windows updates get applied.

I just wanted to share this since there seems to be no results for it yet searching on Google. Hopefully this comes up and you get it fixed.

Plagiarism

I was thinking like I always do about random, mostly senseless ideas and decided to write down this thought.

I recently got volunteered into a project that involved reverse engineering an IT infrastructure that may be abandoned. We may need to crack the network, domain, etc. and I was working on the domain part. I had been under the impression that a Windows Active Directory domain was uncrackable for someone that doesn't specialize in hacking / security. It took us 30 minutes to successfully reset the domain admin password on a domain controller to which we only had physical access to. How? 2 minutes searching on Google for someone else that figured it out.

I also got volunteered into a project that involved implementing mandatory user logins to a set of asp pages. I used scripts that were already created and just adapted them to work in our environment.

I also hear of Web development teams viewing source code of porn sites to get formatting ideas.

With the world sharing knowledge on a grand scale on the web almost anything can be answered with a search and some deduction skills. I consider myself to be a moderately intelligent person and I plagiarize other peoples ideas all the time. If all of us moderately intelligent people continue this trend, won't we decline in our ability to think up ideas for ourselves? Won't we then become creatures of instinct and not creatures of concept? Maybe only the most brilliant of the population will continue to exhibit free thought and everyone else will just follow them creating some crazy follow-the-leader civilization that gets dumber by the day.

De-evolution?