Sloooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww Reboot!

[CA1312174]

Every HP DL380G4 server that we have built (probably around 25 or so this year) with windows 2003 has a strange problem. Whenever I attempt a graceful bounce, the machine will respond to pings for up to 20 minutes! Once it finally reboots it takes a couple of mintues and comes back online fine, but this is a serious issue. I have 2 systems that use NLB clustering and I need them to failover immediately if one node is not responding. What happens is that because the node still responds to pings, the service does not fail over for up to 20 minutes causing outages that should not happen. Any idea?

[CA1305537]

I had a similar problem, but it only took 7 minutes to shutdown. The problem was the pagefile was set to clear at shutdown.
That was a quick registry edit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory anagement
DWORD:ClearPageFileAtShutdown
0 is disabled 1 is enabled

The system would respond to pings for a full 7 minutes after shutdown was initiated. After diabling clearing the pagefile it shutdown significantly quicker.

If you are initiating the reboot, perhaps a fast shutdown tool would be better? I've used them before, but never fully in a production environment.

Other settings include the WaitToKillService
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillServiceTimeout

Defaults are 60000 (60 seconds). Just set it really low.

If this happens to be an Exchange box, you would also do well do stop the services, then shutdown. Same goes for the WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service.

I also had a client where the server was inundated with spyware. One of the admins would browse the web from the server logged on with complete admin rights... It's unlikely, but it never hurts to scan for it. Also, you could disable any unecessary services and audit anything that is set to launch when you boot. Systernals makes a pretty good utility called autoruns that can help you with this... http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/autoruns.html
The theory is if less ir running then there is less to shutdown...

HTH

[CA660088]

I do not have all the specifics as I am away from the office, but I have seen symptoms like this when there are issues with the Active Directory. Specifically with machine policies coming from AD. Anything in the event logs?

[CA1076661]

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=942381

[CA1312174]

Good - I can't imagine I am the only one seeing this issue. Like I said, it's a common issue with most all the G4's we have built this year. It's quite a pain keeping up with all these different versions of smartstart, PSP, etc... I'v devoted the last week to try upgrading the homepage, agents and version control agent to the highest level on all of our boxes just to get HP SIM 4.2 working correctly. I have resorted to manual installations. I really don't think HP's push technology works well at all. I also think HP SIM is extremely bad and is way harder to deploy and setup than it ever should be. Thanks for the reply link; at least they are working on this one.