In my full-time job, this week has been a plethora of lessons learned. The story I tell here applies to anyone that is in charge of networks… or more importantly, your admins on that network.

Earlier this week, I received a disturbing email letting me know that certain services were down on our network. Specifically, some vital web pages used for specific things were not working, and troubleshooting was taking place. The webpages in question were owned by a particular shop of mine that was in the middle of development for a project that was about six months in the works.

Normally, this would not be an issue because I have several network and system admins in charge of troubleshooting situations just like this. The problem was that the development server was configured a bit different than the other normal servers. In this case, both IIS (Windows Web Server) and XAMPP (Linux Web Server) were installed on the same machine to test which platform was the most useful for this developer. The decision was made by that team to go ahead with XAMPP; however, IIS was still installed and on by default.