On wednesday night I installed spamassassin for Austin Stone. Because of Newton’s Second law or perhaps more accurately Finagle’s Law this resulted in Outlook Web Access ceasing to function. The other lovely websites on our box were humming along nicely, so I naturally assumed I had broken Exchange, which sends me into alternating fits of uncontrollable rage and inconsolable depression. Exchange is among the greatest pieces of software in existance when it’s working and a force of evil when it is not.
Turns out SpamAssassin is written in Perl (i knew this already) and when you install ActivePerl it helpfully creates some script bindings in IIS. The problem is that it does a terrible job of it and to make matters worse does it even if you tell it not to do IIS inegration. It installs 2 script mappings, but fails to provide a path to the executable for the second one. IIS apparently completely chokes on the default application pool (in which OWA runs) if someone doesn’t give a path (an SDET somewhere needs to be poked with something sharp). Now i’ve finally cleared that script mapping, and now it’s just a matter of somehow undoing all the stuff i tried to do to fix it.
500 - Internal Server Error