Server Freezes

[darrenjamesw]

W2k Standard running as DC and File Server, 10 USer XP Pro network. Server has 2.8 P4 HT, 2 GB Ram, Promise RAID (mirroring). HP 40G Tape Drive. This Server has been rock solid for 2 years. In the last 2 months I have arrived at work to find the network and server unresponsive. All I can do is hard reboot the server. The only things I can see in the Event Viewer is that all activity seemed to stop at the time scheduled backup is to start. Any ideas? Could the tape drive be freezing the server?

 

[porkchopexpress]

Does it happen every time the backup runs?

 

[darrenjamesw]

No, it is intermittent. I should mention that my backup routine first backs up to HD, then later this backup is copied to tape. The freeze always seems to happen within the 1st minute of the backup routine (i.e. Event logs suddenly stop at this point)

 

[Seaspray0]

Possible intermittent hard drive corruption. You may have a sector starting to go bad.

A+/MCP/MCSE/MCDBA

 

[tubbaguts]

check your available drive space. Make sure there is enough to take the backup to disk.

 

[darrenjamesw]

There is enough room on the HD for the backups plus any temporary caching,it appears as I get deeper into my diagnosis that there is some sort of pattern. It looks as though this happens on Tuesday nights only (so far). I'm going to look at the Tuesday backup batch file and see if anything is different.

 

[darrenjamesw]

Scratch the pattern. It happened again last night. It is defibetly freezing during the backup routine. I'll try running some performance measurements tonight.

 

[be1234]

What backup software are you using? Today I got a similar experience with my Symantec BackupExec v10d. The whole server hanged and my Exchange server which is residing on the same machine kicks all the user out.

 

[darrenjamesw]

Was using Server 2003 built-in backup. It really seemed to be related to the shadow copy service. I have since re-built the server and only time will tell. I would suggest turning off shadow copy unless you are running backups while users are logged on

 

[NickFerrar]

I'd also check if you're doing scheduled disk defrags or AV scans during the backup. We had some servers here that would reboot occassionally overnight during our backups, it turned out defragging was scheduled around the same time as the backups, I rescheduled the defrag and they haven't crashed since. We had a similar issue with forced AV scans to, now we just do on-access anyway.