Aaron Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 Hoping that someone could shed some light on this issue for me. We have a server running server 2008 32bit with 4gb of ram, quad core 2.67GHz processor and plenty of hard drive space on a raid array. What is happening is randomly printers stop printing around the school and when i try to log in either remote or at the server it just sits at loading user profile settings and goes no further it could be left for 20-30 mins just does do anything and it takes a reboot to fix the issue. Once the reboot has been done the printers start printing again and everything is fine but I don’t like having to shut the server down just incase something happens to the raid array. This server does do everything DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, File Services, Print Services, Backup. anti virus and Windows Deployment Services. We do have another server which is used to shadow the DC01 Active Directory. Can anyone suggest a reason for the server to keep freezing after checking event viewer there is nothing here to suggest why it would stop responding? Any help would be much appreciated
bladedanny Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 It doesn't happen to be a Dell does it? I had a very similar issue the cause of which was the Dell printer status service crashing and was unable to be stopped. A quick cmd to force stop the service brought the server back to life without a restart.
FN-GM Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 I have had this before, the exact same. As it happens mine was a Dell server. We moved the server to another role before it was fixed. The server now runs ok with 2008 R2.
Admiral208 Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 This happened to me once. It turned out that it was a user sending a lot of photos to be printed. The print job was being sent to the server and the disk space went down to a couple of KB's. This meant that it took ages for me to log in to the server. Once I realised what was causing the problem I was able to cancel the print jobs from the users workstation to free up the space. But you have said that you have a lot of HD space. Do you have the drive partitioned? that was our main problem. Our drive was partitioned into a C and D. The D had loads of space bu the C (where all the print jobs were sent) only had about 1.5 GB free. not much when you send 2 GB worth of photos to print... EDIT: Just realised you said it was 2008. Our server was running 2003 at the time. Im sure the same applies though.
Aaron Posted January 12, 2011 Author Posted January 12, 2011 thanks everyone for the replies my server is partitioned but the C drive has over 13gb free space while the main storage for pupils has over 150gb free and staff have over 180gb free. The server is a fujitsu server i am hoping to move roles when it comes to the summer i have just bought the lisences for 2008 R2 i cant see any printer error messages and all printers do seem to work again as soon as the server is restarted, when it does freeze i cant log into the server to see if any process has failed and the event viewer doesnt show any problems before i shutdown. thanks for the replies though i am hoping to move to 2008 R2 over the summer and move some machines over to windows 7
Admiral208 Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 Can you send jobs to the printers from the server? maybe you could try updating the printer drivers?
jamesreedersmith Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 Have you tried looking in the management console from the other server when it crashes to see if you can look at the services that way? I believe you can also look at the resource monitor on another computer remotely and see if you can identify what is causing the freeze (CPU/Ram/Hard disk) etc. James 1
Aaron Posted January 12, 2011 Author Posted January 12, 2011 Thanks James no i havent tried that before ill give that a go as well next time it seems to freeze. Hi Admiral yes i can send any job from the server when im logged in and they all seem to print
Admiral208 Posted January 12, 2011 Posted January 12, 2011 Is this happening because someone has sent something to print, or as a result of this happening, can users not print. What happens first? user prints or something happens to the server?
Aaron Posted January 12, 2011 Author Posted January 12, 2011 no no sorry the server freezes up and the first thing that gives me a clue before trying to login is that printers have stopped working then when i go to log into the server i can see its frozen with printing there is no issues just gives me a heads up when all printers seem to stop printing i have an idea that its the server needs to be restarted.
Admiral208 Posted January 13, 2011 Posted January 13, 2011 So to confirm, the problem is that at random intervals, the server freezes. is there nothing in the event log?
Aaron Posted January 13, 2011 Author Posted January 13, 2011 nothing in the event log to show any reason why the server has frozzen right up to the point when ive had to switch it off logs were fine. its not happening on a specific day or anything it could be say over the weekend or on a wednesday night or anything night i come in the next day and things are at a go slow and try to log into the server and its frozzen
Aaron Posted January 17, 2011 Author Posted January 17, 2011 well today the server has frozzen on me while i was actually logged on doing updates to GPO and i have tried using the other server to view the services which works great by the way but i cant seem to be able to see the task manager to see if something is eatting up memory. I logged off the server and when trying to log back on again i get "please wait for the System Event Notification Service" and it doesnt seem to go any further when i try to restart services i get a message saying the RPC service is unavailable so i check to see if it is started and it is but i cant restart or stop this service. I also cant seem to check the event view of the server remotely because of the same message RPC service is unavailable. at the moment the only fix i can do is shutdown the server and reboot.
Admiral208 Posted January 17, 2011 Posted January 17, 2011 If the RPC server is unavailable, you could for a short time turn off the firewall or add an exception. That helped me once when I had an RPC message.
bladedanny Posted January 17, 2011 Posted January 17, 2011 When I got RPC error my DNS settings for the statically assigned IP was set incorrectly. May be unrelated but worth a check if you haven't already.
jamesreedersmith Posted January 17, 2011 Posted January 17, 2011 Random and off the wall suggestion - are there any usb hard drives/pen sticks plugged in the server?
Aaron Posted January 18, 2011 Author Posted January 18, 2011 thanks guys for all your suggestions, I do have a usb key fob in the server for licenses to solidworks but other than that theres nothing else plugged in. I have checked the DNS records but everything seems to be fine.
Mr.G Posted January 18, 2011 Posted January 18, 2011 To be honest 2GB doesn't seem a lot for all those Services to be running. Why not split the load? Anyway...first thing to check is available memory (windows task manager, performance tab - being quickest, or in the Server Manager Console), if that's very low then that would be my first point of problem resolution. If that is fine...you say you've checked logs....how thoroughly? Can you paste any errors you have here? G
jamesreedersmith Posted January 18, 2011 Posted January 18, 2011 thanks guys for all your suggestions, I do have a usb key fob in the server for licenses to solidworks but other than that theres nothing else plugged in. I have checked the DNS records but everything seems to be fine. Could the crash relate to the usb dongle being accesed by the software -we had a server that would regularly lock up and nothing in the event log and we eventually tracked it down to when the USB backup drive was attached and accessed it would crash shortly after - can you try it without the dongle in for a while?
Aaron Posted January 18, 2011 Author Posted January 18, 2011 i will see if i can post up logs tomorrow thanks guys
Aaron Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 it looks like the server stops when trying to run backups on the usb backup drive, we change between two drives and its working great on one but doesnt back up on the other i am reformatting the drive at the moment to see if i can access it again through windows backup service but going to get myself another server and try and load balance instead of being totally reliant on the one. Thanks guys for all your help i will you know how i get on once this backup drive has reformatted.
jamesreedersmith Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 Its sounds exactly like what was happening on our server - as i elluded to in earlier posts - it was a faulty drive in the end on ours so may be worth swapping it out for a spare if you have one.
Aaron Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 thank you i am reformatting the drive at the moment and going to check and see if it does a backup tonight on Monday and if it is still failing i will replacing the drive thank you for the earlier post as well
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