Erractic Win2K behavior

[Chelvan]

Hello all,

We have around 200 Win2K Pro. desktops installed on our
campus. The erratic behavior was first brought to our
attention last fall, and then it re-appeared again earlier
this year, and for the third time this past week.

The erratic behavior,
1. Spontaneous reboots. The user can be in any application
and the system will simply restart.

2. Losing mapped network drives.

Next, the reason I mentioned the specific times is
because, it was then that the campus, faculty, staff and
students machines were hit hard by viruses. Blaster in the
fall, MyDoom at the start of this year and this week,
Bagel and Netsky.

When we have infected computers on our network, Win2K pcs
exhibit the above behaviors. These erratic pcs *are not*
infected with the virus. When we do finally eradicate the
virus from our internal network, these pcs are stable
again.

Anyone have any ideas as to what's going on and what it is
that we could do? Until we clean all the infected pcs,
this problem will go on.

TIA

Chelvan

 

[Steven L Umbach]

That is not an indication of a healthy machine. You may want to try scanning them
with a different virus scanner, looking at the processes running on them, and making
sure they are current with critical updates at Windows Update. You could try
disabling file and print sharing on those computers if they are not offering shares
nor need to be managed remotely via Computer Management which may reduce their
vulnerability from infected computers if they are suffering from severe denial of
service or other attacks. Another thing to do along those lines is to use ipsec
filtering like a built in firewall to configure them to allow communications with
authorized or needed computers such as those they need to access for shares or domain
controllers. --- Steve

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1559