Server needs rebooting every 2/3 days

[harry]

Hi Everyone, please can you help? We are an RM managed school and we are having issues with our print server (Windows Server 2008 R2), which needs rebooting every 2/3 days, with either that you cannot connect to because of a time/date mismatch or no logon servers available.

All that is on it are the Konica Minolta printers and PCounter. Our setup is that all 8 servers are virtualised using VMWare, 3 DC's, and 5 member servers and this is the only server that falls over . All servers get their time from the primary DC, all servers are up to date .

We have deleted and re-added the virtual NIC. Checked and flushed DNS, checked DHCP, registered the date and time using the w32tm command and moved it to a different host RM dialled in and say they can't fix it as it is a cloned server (i can't believe that is the cause). It is strange that only this server is affected so i don't think it is VMWare related

Does anybody have any ideas please?

 

Thank you

[limawhiskey]

Is the time out of sync on your host?

 

VMware have a pretty comprehensive article which helped me: Timekeeping best practices for Windows, including NTP (1318) | VMware KB

[limawhiskey]

They seem to have a quite a few KB articles about time sync. See also Troubleshooting NTP on ESX and ESXi 4.x / 5.x / 6.x (1005092) | VMware KB

[harry]

Thanks LimaWhiskey, we have checked the ESXi hosts timing, but that is ok. There are other servers on this host that aren't affected. We moved hosts to check this too.

 

Cheers.

Harry

[mukz]

Whats event log saying on the windows server? Can u post a screen shot of any errors?

[AlanD]

We have an RM server running printer credits and is the printer server for our network. Our problem was increasingly degradation of response time, eventually leading to inability to login....but we have what looks like a memory leak. RM couldn't fix it (sometimes wonder what we pay for...but to be fair they did spend a fair bit of time on it...) so we whacked 32Gb ram in and it settles down to using around 16Gb. Is your memory use static ...less than 8Gb? Set alarm bells ringing because we have a lot ok Konica Minolta printers too....we experimented with different versions of drivers...but couldn't prove this as a cause...and the trouble is we didn't have the luxury of experimenting on a production server box...

[limawhiskey]

When the server stops responding or you can't connect remotely, can you verify that the time is incorrect by logging in from the vSphere console with a local account? Just thinking to rule out your time issue.

[GuyJD]

I've had a similar problem but with a physical server that provides DNS and print services, I tried various different things to fix it but nothing worked, I didn't want to flatten it and start fresh so I just setup a reboot script that triggers every night at 3am, not an ideal solution but short of starting fresh it keeps the server working without having to remember to reboot it.

[enjay]

I used to work at an RM school. In my experience, everything just seemed to run a bit smoother once a started scheduling a weekly restart of the servers. This shouldn't be needed, of course, but it was better than having to restart it during the day.

 

Make sure your printers just have the drivers only, not any of the bloatware which comes with some (especially HP!). Our Kyocera ones wanted the KX drivers not any others.

[harry]

Hi everybody, thanks for your help on this. I figured that i would have to schedule a reboot. Not a clean solution but it'll have to do until we go vanilla. :boxing:rm.

 

 

 

Cheers

[AlanD]

...to be honest ...this doesn't sound like an RM issue....so its not going to go away by moving to vanilla....

[enjay]

...to be honest ...this doesn't sound like an RM issue....so its not going to go away by moving to vanilla....

 

It did for us...