DNS Problem

[Guest richard]

Came into work this morning to find that the DNS server service had stopped for the second time in 2 weeks. I was able to restart it with no problems but it has me concerned because when I checked the event logs there were no errors again.

 

My worry is that it will fail on a day when I am not here (I work here 3 days a week) and they will have no access to the network. Any one got any ideas as this has me stumped?

[cheesypete]

Are you saying that the event logs didnt even mention the fact that it had stopped, or that it did say they stopped but nothing else?

 

Is there anything else on your network thats trying to handle DNS requests?

[steveg]

It doesn't solve the cause of your problem, but you might want to set the recovery properties of the DNS service to re-start itself if it does crash, at least that way it will get re-started even if your not there.

 

It may also fail to start again immediately after it has crashed, in which case you might get something useful in the event log.

 

Steve

[Guest richard]

Are you saying that the event logs didnt even mention the fact that it had stopped, or that it did say they stopped but nothing else?

 

Is there anything else on your network thats trying to handle DNS requests?

 

There is nothing in the event logs to say that is has stopped only the fact that it has been restarted. Its like someone has just been in and stopped the service manually. I have just set the service to restart automatically so I hope that it will help but I would like to know whats causing this.

[Mr_T]

Just a thought is it possible you have had a power outage and DNS isnt starting up automaticaly?

[Guest richard]

We did have a power outage last week but I was able to shut the servers down as they are connected to a ups. When I rebooted the server everything started ok and there have been no outages since that time.

[bandgeekmafia78]

Personally I would run/schedule a batch file to start the DNS service periodically. That way, even if the service stops it will be back up and running pretty quickly.

 

Not a solution but might be handy if you aren't gonna be on site for a few days!

[Guest richard]

Well so far its sems to be behaving itself as I had no call yesterday when I was at my other school and its all working today.

[Geoff]

Our Windows servers reboot weekly (at the weekend), to avoid 'reliability' problems like this (it also makes patch management easier).

[m25man]

This sounds like a memory leak!

The DNS service probably shutdown when it tried to do something like a registration or scavenge because there was no ram left to use.

 

Popular causes include print jobs left in queues, SQL services such as Sophos MSDE and others.

 

1. How much Ram does your box have?

2. What background services does it run?

3. What foreground applications are running?

4. How much diskspace is there on your pagefile disk?

5. Are you running any print queues?

6. Are any of the printers GUI based - such as cheap and nasty ones with barely any RAM in them?

 

If you don't have enough RAM these things will swap in and out of disk all the time causing the weakest process to crap out when it's supposed to come back to RAM and work correctly.

 

Had one server that would regularly stall the DHCP service when ever a load of print jobs had been left in a queue all weekend! HP1320 drivers were the cause used all the ram up and failed to hand it back to the server when the jobs failed to print.

 

I like to use whatsrunning to find out exactly who stole my ram!

http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx