Last night, one of our developers stumbled across an odd issue. I think I’ve seen it before, but it was a long while back. Windows 2003 server is fairly well locked down to not be running applications it shouldn’t be. This is a good thing (tm). The problem is, it seems to stop tasks such as creating VPN tunnels. The developer referenced an odd error message. That was:
Unable to create the specified connection.
This can be caused by insufficient memory or not enough disk space.
Now I know the disk space isn’t an issue, they have 80GB drives in, and this is a clean install of Windows 2003 server. Memory? A possibility I guess, but 1GB for Win2003 should be enough to allow it to run, and create a vpn connection (but you never know I guess).
It turns out the error message is entirely missleading. Missleading in the fact that it has nothing to do with drive space, or memory, but more to do with services not running. It’s a known “issue” and is documented in KB254631.