Graceful Exits

After several administrative steps over a few months, we suddenly found the following error coming from an instance of SQL Server on a virtual machine:

Your SQL Server installation is either corrupt or has been tampered with (unable to load SQLBOOT.DLL). Please uninstall them re-run setup to correct this problem.

Nobody had been keeping an eye [...]

E-mail-based error reporting, whether from a system specifically designed to provide it (like Nagios) or as a bolt-on to an application or framework, is only as good as the underlying error diagnostics. So when one of our clients’ Coldfusion app sent me a message today with the brief summary “null null”, the server might as [...]