Cannot Login - Problem with Server.nlm???

[Catadmin]

Greetings, all.

I am admining a Netware 4.11 server with about 10 "clients". I know next to nothing about Novell, though I've been trying to read the documentation on Novell's website. Last friday, when we all left work, everything seemed to be fine. However, when I came in this morning and tried to log into the network, my PC got the error message "The username context pair you entered is an illegal NDS name." This message was on 2 machines. On 2 or three other machines was a message saying it was unable to write the server. I tried shutting down all the PCs and rebooting the server, but it got stuck searching for a boot disk in the CDROM for about 2 hours.

Finally, I gave up and called the computer repairman who told me it wasn't detecting the drivers. He cleaned it out, checked the connections (even unplugged and replugged them in) and was able to bring the server back up. Not an hour after he left, the server started dropping people from the system and now the error messages are that it can't find the tree and directory I'm looking for.

I have a nasty feeling this means the hard drives have crashed, but I wanted to check with this group and see if anyone else has any other suggestions on what I can do. Help would be appreciated.

Danke. Catadmin - New to Server Admin, but willing to learn... All help is appreciated.

 

[Catadmin]

Oh, DOH! Forgot to mention most important thing. When I shifted through the tabs and got to the server prompt, I saw an error message saying

"The Netware OS detected a problem with the system while execurity a process owned by SERVER.NLM. It may be the source of the problem or there may have been a memory corruption"

"The running process will be returned to a safe state."


Does anyone know what this horrible sounding message means??

Danke Catadmin - New to Server Admin, but willing to learn... All help is appreciated.

 

[ak8899]

Can you bring up the server again? If yes, check the ABEND.LOG and the SYS$LOG.ERR in the SYS:SYSTEM directory for additional info.

There is a good Abend Troubleshooting doc available:

http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/10017179.htm

Good Luck!
Alain

regards,
Alain
CCDA/CCNA

 

[TheLad]

Sounds to me like the server has abended. A reboot should resolve the issue, and as stated above you can check the abend.log to see what caused it.

I would not worry about it too much, servers crash just like workstations do (not as often though) apart from the fact it's more hassle when a server does. -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
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