Server freezing up at odd times. Getting very frequent. 1

[asya1]

We just set up our windows 2000 server just after Christmas and have been having system freezes since jan 1st.
Each time we had to do a hard reset because the server was completely frozen.
No one is in the office between 6pm and 7am most nights and no nightly processes are scheduled that I know of.

These freezes happened on:
01/01/03 12:14am
01/15/03 5:39am
01/16/03 4:31pm
01/18/03 8:17pm
01/19/03 2:39am
1/20/03 - 12:52am
1/21/03 - 2:07am, 7:08am, 7:52am, 8:30am and 12:24pm

At approx. 9am I removed all printers and tape backup devices from the server to see if I could stop it from crashing. (Many errors indicate it could be a printer or the scsi tape drive). No schedulers were running and users were told they could not use the affected printers today.

Now for the fun part

Every single event 6008 returned 2003 - The requested metafile operation is not supported.
To my knowledge there is nothing that should be running at these times of night that would be performing any metafile operations.

Other codes returned relate to :
- not being able to access media due to write permissions, the drive/path/file being missing or locked by another process.
- there not being enough space available to perform the command/operation.
- storage control blocks being destroyed or invalid.
- the handle is invalid
- being unable to remove directories
and a couple data error(cyclic redundancy check) or incorrect function messages.


Since the server has crashed after removing the printer and tape drive I am kind of at a loss for where to look next. When I look up the return codes online there are so many possible reasons for each that I'm at a loss. Has anyone had similar experiences or have any suggestions for what to look at next?


Marjorie

 

[k5cqh]

How about the old power line glitch theory. Remember the case of the custodian coming in and plugging the vacuum cleaner into the same circuit as the server. Try a good on line type UPS.

 

[fuunstatic]

what backup software are you using

we had a similar problem where the backup software was creating large log files on the c drive and so running out of disk space which in turn meant windows was unable to create temp files for printing and other processes etc

 

[asya1]

I know it can't be a power issue as we only have cleaning people in on weekends and have a good ups.

We are currently using NovaBack but will probably change as the scheduler window won't even open in windows 2000. We are only using it at the moment to make sure we have everything needed from the backups of the old server.

The person who installed it says they didn't set up any scheduled tasks but I can't view the scheduler to be absolutely sure. I know that event viewer doesn't show any applications running at night other than server processes.

Do you know a way I could check for a process that was eating all the memory before a crash?

Marjorie