That’s utimately the worst phone call or email anyone doing what I do can receive. It makes me break out in a sweat immediately before I even know what the problem is … Sometimes, it isn’t my problem, and that makes me angry. Sometimes it is my problem, and that makes me angrier! Most times lately, this is due to the Windows systems rebooting on their own. As I recall, the first time this happened, I researched it and created this page: http://www.icuhost.net/bug_check.html for an acquiantance of mine to look at … After his seeing that page, he sent me the following:
Your Windows issues, it is kind of outside my area of expertise. I can keep my servers running to support my development efforts, but that is mostly with duct tape, spit, and a prayer. Did you go to http://oca.microsoft.com/en/Welcome.asp? In addition, you can turn off auto-reboot and actually see the BSOD that brought your system down. I am going off WinXP/Win2K3, but presumably, it is similar in Win2K. Windows-Break to bring up system properties, on Advanced tab under startup hit settings, and uncheck automatically restart under System failure. You can also change the option to do a complete memory dump, which will give you additional information should it happen again. Do you have anything in your event log? I am also not seeing too many suspects that are running in Kernel mode. Perl should be running exclusively in user mode. Black Ice Defender runs in Kernel mode. Are you running WHQL drivers all around on this box? These are the usual suspects.
So, the decision was made to migrate everything running off of those Windows boxes and create new ones to take their place … This process has been slow going as there are people utilizing the setups on those boxes … The DNS has been moved off, but the mail servers are still active … I have been trying to get everyone to migrate over to the FreeBSD mail server voluntarily, but that isn’t going as well as expected. I thought people would jump at the chance at FREE SPAM and Virus protection? Maybe I need to word it just like that so that it looks sweeter rather than a chore …