Windows 2000 Server hangs but can still ping.

[cintreon]

In the past 2 weeks a windows 2000 server in our network hung 3 times.
In each instance the screen is still visible, but I am unable to use
the mouse or keyboard. The odd thing is that I can still ping the
server but I cannot connect to it via VNC or any other way. All
services that are running on the server are stopped. The only way that
I can remedy the problem is to reboot. After that, things are fine.
Another odd thing is that all 3 occurences have happened after hours or
over the weekend.
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

In the past 2 weeks a windows 2000 server in our network hung 3 times.
In each instance the screen is still visible, but I am unable to use
the mouse or keyboard. The odd thing is that I can still ping the
server but I cannot connect to it via VNC or any other way. All
services that are running on the server are stopped. The only way
that I can remedy the problem is to reboot. After that, things are
fine. Another odd thing is that all 3 occurences have happened after
hours or over the weekend.
Any help would be appreciated.

Event logs give you any clues?


PS: posting your valid e-mail address in a newsgroup post, or in your news
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future.

 

[Guest]

Do they cut back on the air conditioning during off hours or are your
machines in an area with units you control?

 

[cintreon]

Do they cut back on the air conditioning during off hours or are your

machines in an area with units you control?

I can pretty much rule out air conditioning. The temp stays the same.
The event logs show absolutely nothing which is very odd to me. I
don't see how a server cannot function yet still be able to ping it.
It happened again today. This makes the 2nd day in a row that this has
happened. It appears that it occured right before business hours, so
the first person in might be doing something. I can rule out foul
play, but there might be a virus that runs on a clients pc at login or
something. This just seems too odd to be true. I wish I had more to
go on.

 

[Guest]

The fact that you can ping it doesn't seem odd to me - it's like a brain dead
person who still blinks their eyes - I think upper layer services can crash
and not neccesarily affect something like icmp.

 

[cintreon]

The fact that you can ping it doesn't seem odd to me - it's like a brain dead
person who still blinks their eyes - I think upper layer services can crash
and not neccesarily affect something like icmp.

It froze up one last time yesterday and there was finally an error in
the event log. It was a paging error on the hard drive. Either the
hard drive was going bad or having to turn the server off the past few
days caused the drive to crash. In any case, I replaced the drive and
I am now running raid on this particular server. If it hangs again, I
guess I'll look into ram.

 

[Guest]

that makes total sense - I don't know why that didn't even enter my mind.
Thanks for sharing the solution.