Server locking up

[memcom]

Our windows 2000 member server has been locking up about 4 times a week. It always happens at night when no one is in the office working on the database and it does not happen at any consitant time. No backup jobs or SQL agent jobs are running most of the times that it locks up. Times range from 6:00 pm until 8:25 am the next day. When I come in, I find that the computer is turned on, but most of the time the screen will not come on when moving the mouse and I am not able to ping it from another computer. The only thing that that shows up in the event veiwer at all is "The previous system shutdown at 'time' was unexpected." The time is always long before I hit the reset button. I have not been able to find any consitancy in when the server locks up. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can find the problem?

Thanks,
Michael

 

[Copierbw]

This might be a way out suggestion but for what it's worth... Although my setup looks a bit different than yours I had a similar problem with W2K-Server "locking-freezing". Seeing that I also had no consistancy in the occurance, tracking down was very difficult. Well to make a long story short.. After that was happening for a while suddenly the server started locking on startup, just after restoring the network connections before or after logon (also inconsistant). Well I finally narrowed my problem down to IIS and changed autostartup of all the IIS services to manual. I played with the services over a period to see what happens in certain configuartions and my locking up is gone for good....

 

[tekbabe]

I just had this happen to me yesterday. My server locked up and I couldn't see the screen or anything. I discovered that my when my logs in the event viewer filled up it killed the server. It seems this is a security thing in W2K to prevent intrusion. I changed the logs files to "overwrite events as needed" and made then 4 megs each. I'm not sure if yours is the same problem but give it a try.