Sever Hangs

[Ayman Altounji]

I have been trying to isolate a recurring lockup of our PDC. Fairly reliably it will lock up after about 6 weeks. It is a PIII 500 256MB RAM, RAID Controller 221, 3 HS 7200 RPM SCSI drives and DLT 4000 drive. NT4 with SP 6.0a

I have applied System Rompaq, SSD, updated all third party applications. Also install the latest MDAC.

Had RAM, CPU, and DLT drive replaced.

I have also been running perf mon for months and nothing shows up as being a memory or resource leak.

The only thing left is to update the RAID controller and SCSI drive firmware.

Anything else come to mind as a possible solution.

Thanks

[Ayman Altounji]

What are you running on this system? Do you know if there is any particular thing happening about that time (since it seems rather regular)? Like maybe some form of database compression or....?

[Ayman Altounji]

Thanks for reply,

I have BU Exec running on the system. The hangs always happen during BU jobs. The symptoms seem to be consistent with a resource leak. But nothing shows in Perf Mon logs that I have. But I strongly feel that if it isn't hardware related, it may be something to do with the BU software which I have updated to the latest build of version 8.0 or a device driver that may not like to coexist with the tape driver. I recently changed the DLT driver from the Veritas DLT driver to the Compaq one in case this may have been the issue.

Thanks,

Tim

[Ayman Altounji]

Can you tell me how the tape drive is setup (what controller, SCSI ID...etc...)? Does anything like this happen if you try using NT's (admittedly weak) backup software?

[Ayman Altounji]

It is using the built in controller, and it is the only device using that controller. The HDD are using a raid 221 controller. It is configured as SCSI ID 6 I think. I can't say whether the server would exhibit the same issue with NT backup becuase I can't see myself using for a six week period.

Thanks

[Ayman Altounji]

Old firmware on array controllrs has been a cause of lockups - search for the document EX990921_cw01 on the www.compaq.com web site - and if applicable create disk 1 of the options rom paq and upgrade the firmware on the 221 array controller