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Strange problem with Windows 2000 server

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by trussell

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We have a Windows 2000 server with a strange problem. After the system has been restarted it behaves normally from the console. After 1 to 2 days you can log in but then the console locks up about the only thing you can do is CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at the task manager etc. The task manager does not show processor or memory pegged to max and there doesn't seem to be a process hogging the system. All this time the system continues to serve files normally. You can connect to the event viewer from another system but no problems are logged. The server must be restarted to clear this condition. It runs ok otherwise and can be left this way for a week at least but you cannot log in to look at the system.

System Software Information.
Windows 2000 SP3 all critical updates applied.
CA ARCServe 2000 Workgroup edition back software.
CA eTrust InoculateIT anti-virus (Removed today to see if it was the cause)
SQL Server 7 (SQL server has was also disabled today)

5 replies

by curlergirl

I can think of a few things that could cause this - heavy file i/o for example might cause the GUI desktop response time to be so slow that it would virtually look like the server was freezing, even if the CPU and memory weren't maxed out. Is this a possibility? Another possibility is something that is running in the foreground or using lots of foreground processes - antivirus software is a good one for this, so disabling it will tell you a lot. I've seen similar behavior on servers where the antivirus software was running a full system scan at the same time that users were doing heavy file i/o (always a mistake).

These things are always very tricky to diagnose and I just recommend disabling anything that's non-essential first, then the more essential elements, until you find the culprit. I have a server that has had a similar problem, and it eventually finally stopped responding to the network. This apparently was caused by a disk defrag utility that I have running automatically with no problems on other servers but for some reason this server doesn't like it. So, if the antivirus software doesn't solve it, look at other utilities like disk defraggers, network undelete software, backup software, etc., that might be misbehaving. Hope this helps!

by trussell

Thanks, I was on that road. It seems fine now that I have removed the Anti-virus etc.. I have re-installed some of the first things I removed after they were ruled out and things are still fine. I did note that what ever was causing the problem it was causing the memory usage to be twice what it normally was. Thanks for the tips.

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