Problem: I cannot submit my timesheet

At my company we use Deltek’s suite of CRM tools including Time and Expense. We have been getting help desk calls for users being unable to submit their time sheets. They have been intermittent and we have been unable to spot a pattern in browser usage or user type. I was assigned to the problem yesterday and this morning the helpdesk started lighting up with the issue.

Submitting my time sheet through Firefox did not work, but it worked using Internet Explorer. So that immediately discounts the possible cause of being 1) application is broken 2) network is causing the issue.

I do not have administrative access to the machine so there was only a limited number of things I could do from my desktop – So I loaded up my trusty HTTPFox plugin for Firefox to see if there was any issues with the POST or response. This is what I got back from the server when I hit Save…

<TITLE>ISAPI plug-in Error Message</TITLE><H2>Message from the ISAPI plugin:</H2><P>
Cannot write 2068 bytes to tmp file C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\_wl_proxy\_post_2656_119: GetLastError() 112
<HR><I>Build date/time: Apr 20 2009<I>
<P><HR><B>Change Number:</B> <I>1211636<BR>

This was sent to the Deltek helpdesk and their response was “It looks like a permission problem. I have encountered this issue before and I assigned full permission for all users on the c:\windows\temp\_wl_proxy directory of the IIS server.“

So immediately I responded and said – nope it cannot be a permissions issue because that would not explain it being an intermittent problem. That is a scary solution to the problem and would merely mask any underlying issues if something was causing an authentication issue….

So what else would cause an inability to write to the server?

Is the disk full?

Answer: Yep – the C drive is full to capacity 

That makes complete sense because:

• It is intermittent because Windows is trying to recycle temp space but cannot do it fast enough
• It is worse in the morning because there are more people trying to hit it

 

Conclusion: Gather all the information possible before attempting to solve the problem and don’t always assume that the obvious answer is the correct one .