DL320 800mhz - fine in house, drops comms in garage

[Kurt Alden]

Hello all

Ok, so this is not the most important problem in the world but maybe someone'll find it interesting enough to help out - its a bit bizarre.

I have a Compaq DL320 800mhz I purchased off Ebay. It has Windows server 2003 on it and a wireless network card in it.

When it's in my house it works fine and stays up and running for weeks at a time. However, when I put it in my garage it works fine for an hour or two then loses comms and needs to be rebooted.

The garage is colder than the house (though not by much - it's pretty mild here in the uk) and probably a little humid (though the garage is dry). The servers sat around a foot off the ground on slats so it'll still get plenty of air circulation.

Narrowing down the causes....

It can't be the OS / hardware / set up as it works fine in the house.

It can't be wireless probs / interference /associating with another access point as I had a pc in there before set up the same and that ran fine for months.

I looked in the Windows logs - nothing.

I used the Compaq diags and looks in the server diagnostic log (or whatever it's called). Nothing in there either (except some entries complaining when I put in the wrong memory).

I really cannot work out what's wrong. An old P2 300 pc ran fine in the garage no probs for months set up exactly the same way but my super duper new (to me) DL320 just won't work and has to sit in my office making lots of noise.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm wandering if it doesn't like the humidity or cold or something. However, if that was the case why would just comms be failing? The server is always still up and running (well, making lots of noise) when I go out to investigate. And, if the server shut itself down because it was too humid or cold / hot/ whatever, wouldn't that have been logged?

My girlfriend reckons it's because it doesn't like spiders. To be honest, I'm so stuck with this I'm starting to agree.

Thanks in advance.
K

[Roger Faucher]

Kurt:

Is your office air-conditioned? I assume the garage is not.

Is the server plugged into a UPS in either location? Do you have a UPS to run the server from in the garage, as a test?

Is it a DL320 or a DL329 G2?

When you say just comms are failing, do you mean the server is still up and running otherwise? You can access the desktop and launch programs? By comms do you mean a modem connection or LAN connection? Is it the wireless connection that's failing?

Thanks!

Roger