I have a rackmounted server in a data center some 50 miles away from me in Huntingdon. It’s a lights-out operation, and I can’t remember the last time I visited the server in person. Everything just works through Terminal Services.

The server has been humming along quite happily for a number of years, which is why it’s running Server 2003 and Exchange 2003 – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, sez I.

With such a remote server, you have a hard choice to make – do you set it to auto-update when Microsoft issues new patches, or do you bring them down to a local machine, check them out and then apply them yourself, preferably waiting a few days to see if others have problems?

Well, I would always advocate a managed patch implementation for a local network – it can dramatically reduce the download of updates to multiple identical machines, and gives you, the sysadmin, control over when updates are applied. This can be critically important to the business workflow, of course.
But for a remote server, sat out there in internet-land? Frankly it’s to easy to forget that it’s there, and that you need to keep it patched up, especially if the server isn’t connected to the local LAN via a VPN tunnel. So for such servers, the risk assessment says that its better to go with auto-patching than to forget to patch.

Which is just fine when it goes well. But this morning, I woke up to find my Exchange Server 2003 had no SMTP, no IMAP and no POP3 services running. It had patched itself at 3am as usual, rebooted and come up cleanly except for these services. Hence my inbox was empty. In the approximate words of Pooh, the more I looked, the more my email wasn’t there.

Chatting to mates on Twitter this morning suggests that others have had exactly the same problem, so it is not a localised problem with my box. It might be worth checking that those services are running. Just kick them into action manually, or reboot the server.