An interesting little story from work today.

Late last week we had a call from the feedmill, telling us that a program they run which lets them view reports had stopped working. Upon closer investigation it seemed that the program used an embedded WebBrowser control to hit a local SQL Server Reporting Services machine and display a list of reports to the user. The server it was trying to talk to, though, hasn't been running Reporting Services for ages - it's an old SQL 2000 box that was superceded by a new one many months ago.

To work around the problem, we simply gave them an Internet Explorer shortcut to the same list of reports on the correct server. So their "reports" button in the application is still broken, but at least they could get the information they needed.

Today we got a call from a manager in a more senior position over there asking when it was going to be fixed. He apparently didn't realise that we'd put a workaround in place, so I can't blame him for chasing it up, but it got me curious.

I connected to the old server that the program was trying to talk to, and had a look at its IIS logs (in C:\WinNT\System32\LogFiles\W3SVC1). I opened yesterday's, and found an entry like this:

2008-06-29 21:27:47 192.168.XX.XXX - 192.168.XX.XX 80 GET /Reports/Pages/SearchResults.aspx SearchText=ProdUtil 404 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0;+.NET+CLR+2.0.50727)

Fair enough - a 404 on the URL they requested. Makes sense, since that's the error they're seeing in their application.

So I jumped into PowerShell on my local machine, changed into that folder using a UNC path, and (after a bit of trial and error) ran this command:

select-string "ProdUtil" -path ex08*

Plenty of results there, but a closer look at the filenames that were being returned revealed the fact that they were all on or after June 25th - mid last week. There were no mentions of "ProdUtil" in any of the log files from this year before that date.

Now, I know for a fact that the application they're running has a timestamp of around July 2007, so it's not like somebody gave them a new, broken version of the program. They simply haven't tried to use this feature all year.

So it's an interesting insight into the mind of some users, when problems arise that need to be fixed "ASAP", because they're stopping people from doing something that they're supposed to do every day, yet we find that they have in fact gone over six months without using the feature at all.