Package Servers began to return "Service Unavailable". DefaultAppPool keeps stopping.

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Customer reported that on his package servers with IIS installed, they started to noticed that most of those Package Servers began to return "Service Unavailable". He was also getting error "503.1" related to the Application Pool in the HTTPERR logs.

We discovered that the DefaultAppPool appeared stop. Every time that we tried to recycle the DefaultAppPool, it stayed running for a couple of minutes and then stopped again. In the System Event logs, the following message was found:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1009
Date:  2/23/2010
Time:  2:22:57 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: Machine-F000
Description:
A process serving application pool 'DefaultAppPool' terminated unexpectedly. The process id was '3172'. The process exit code was '0xffffffff'.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Searching online the references that we found for this issue were referring to "The process exit code was '0 xffffffff '" have problems with permissions or privileges.

Cause

Apparently there was an issue with how SP2 for Windows Server 2003 was installed.
See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2009746
Apparently there is a patch that can cause this problem because of dlls that were not installed properly when SP2 for Windows Server 2003 was installed or are in earlier versions:
"Previous to the installation of the KB973917 update, one or more of the core IIS. Dll files were not at the correct file version. Specifically, the earlier installation of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 on the server did not complete successfully, leaving some of the IIS. dlls at the Service Pack 1 level while bringing others up to the Service Pack 2 level. (This can occur when installing IIS onto a system running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 by pointing the installer to a Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 media location). The IIS services had been able to run successfully even with that file mismatch in place. However, the installation of the KB973917 update exposes this pre-existing file mismatch environment to the degree that IIS is now unable to function properly. "

Resolution

We suggested the following based on what we found with the information we have so far:

1. Revize the following Microsoft article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2009746
Apparently there is a patch that can cause this problem because of dlls that were not installed properly when SP2 for Windows Server 2003 was installed or are in earlier versions.

Microsoft suggests that you remove and reinstall SP2 for Windows Server 2003 on affected machines:
"To resolve this problem, reinstall Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 on the web server. This will bring up all IIS 6.0 components to the correct file versions"

According to the customer, reinstalling SP2 for Windows Server 2003 solved the issue with the DefaultAppPool stopping consistenly on certain package servers.

Applies To
Notification Server 6.0.6074 SP3