MS10-024 and KB976323 will reset your IIS SMTP Settings
A client called me this Monday morning and told me there were some issues with one of their sites. The problem turned out to be some issues with the SMTP server. After about 2-3 hours of debugging, I desperately try to do a search on Twitter for “IIS SMTP” and to my surprise, I could actually use Twitter’s real-time functionality (an area where Google sucks) to figure out the solution to my problem.
Apparently, the update KB976323 (Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-024) removed all settings on your SMTP server. How lovely and a big fail for the QA department on Microsoft. I quickly added my own server as a mail relay and everything worked again.
But the worst part of this was not that MS wiped all my settings. The worst part was that it also caused my Application Pool to crash with this fine message.
A process serving application pool ‘MyApplication’ suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service. The process id was ‘388’. The data field contains the error number.
And this actually made my website crash and just give the user an HTTP 503 error (and made quite a disturbance when I celebrated a friend’s birthday and started to get alerts that the site was down). Anyway.. when I uninstalled KB976323 the error message changed to.
A process serving application pool ‘MyApplication’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘2624’. The process exit code was ‘0xe0434f4d’.
Both of these errors went away after I fixed the settings on the SMTP server but FFS Microsoft. Try to do some tests on the updates you push. I want to have automatic updates turned on but I don’t know if I dare after this debacle.
