BDC Freezes at night

[mazinger]

Hello everyone,

I bring to your notice a problem that i am facing these days at one of the network servers, running NT 4.0. Recently, when i come to work, I find that the BDC is frozen and that people are having problem logging on to the network. I have to then restart the server and upon startup it gives a service failure message.

If I check the event viewer, I see 2 stop messages.

1) The windows installer service terminated with the following error: the system could not find out environment option that was entered.

2) The prvious System shutdown at (Date) was unexpected.

There is also a warning which says that The DHCP issued a NACK to the client for the address (IP address) request.

Does anyone have any idea why it might be freezing at nights?. Do I need to run HDD utilities or install latest service packs or so. My knowledge is limited to usage only so I would be grateful if anyone can help with this issue.

Thank you in advance.

Shehzad

 

[Psingh]

Have u schedule any task to run in night.

PSingh

 

[firthm]

PSingh,

Quite right, a scheduled job could be killing the server.

The best way to check this is go to:

Start>Run

Type in "cmd" without the ".

A black command prompt will appear, now type "at" without the ".

If you get a message saying that no jobs are currently scheduled, this is clear.

If you get a table come up with a job listed, you have a scheduled job, look at the time, and the command it runs. If this ties in with your BDC crashing you can delete the job by typing the following in the command prompt:

at *1 /delete

*Look at the job in the table to find out this number, it is listed as the "ID".

If you don't have any jobs running, may I ask, do you have up to date anti-virus software?

Thanks,
Mike Firth

 

[Tubes]

Another option is to take the events from the logs and visit eventid.net. They have an excellent database of errors and remedies for most errors and good details on some of the more obscure ones.

Good luck,

Tubes

 

[mazinger]

Thank you everyone for your valuable comments and tips. I will try them at work tomorrow when I go back to work.

Thanks again.

Shehzad

 

[mazinger]

Psingh, Loaded87,

I did check the "at" command and it says "there are no entried in the list".

Tubes, I will now check the site that you recommended.

I will update any findings.

Thank you all.

Shehzad

 

[mazinger]

Tubes,

I checked the eventid.net website and I tried the source and the eventids that i was getting and I am listing what I got.

EventID: 7023
Source: Service control manager

Explanation from a user:

This event is generated when the Service Control Manager cannot properly operate a service. The name of the service and the error generated by it are displayed in the event. So, the 7023 is not specific to a particular service, or let's say it may occur no matter what service is failing. ( In my case it is Windows Installer service).

____________________________________________________________

Event ID: 6008

Source: EventLog

Explanation:

If a server is powered off without a proper shutdown this event will be generated when the computer is restarted. In some circumstances, when various utilites are used to shut down the system (i.e. shutdown.exe) Windows NT still reports this error. This was fixed in SP 4. ( My specific Server is running has SP 6)

____________________________________________________________


Any suggestions?. One thing to note is that Its is a rather older server with a single processor runnig at 500 MHz and RAM 128. Should I try to increase RAM?.

Thank you.

Shehzad

 

[psson]

I have experienced similar problems with a NT 4 BDC.

It halts mostly at night but has also stopped during business hours.

The machine runs NT 4/SP6, Exchange 5.5, OPTO

The machine doesn't halt all at once. I've noticed that the Exchange server seems to run just fine, except for the Internet mail service.

The GUI also freezes at about the same point. Sometimes I can move the pointer only to realise that the GUI is frozen. At this point the mouse pointer usually gets stuck too.

The rest of the Exchange services can run on for quite a while, but eventually lock up too.

When I look in the Event viewer for hints, there is no obvious pattern to the lockups.

The event preceding the eventlog event stating the previous shutdown was unexpected varies.

The time interval preceding the eventlog messages from system startup varies wildly, from minutes to hours.

The server has been scanned for viruses and has passed the IBM hardware diagnostics test.

I'm quite stumped at this point so ny information regarding this problem would be welcome.

In the last days this server has also shown more dramatic problems which I will post separately.

Thank you in advance

/psson