Automatic Server Recovery (ASR)

[Mike Ng]

I received this alert :

"Event description: The server is operational again. The server has previously been shutdown by the Automatic Server Recovery (ASR) feature and has just become operational again."

What does that mean. I did not shut down the server. How does this come about ?

Thanks.

[Rich Purvis]

Automatic Server Recovery is technically a hardware based server "watchdog". I won't go into great detail other than to say it is implemented through both hardware and software. I don't know what the name of the device driver is anymore for this but it used to be commonly known as the "health" driver. The way it works is that the software "touches" the hardware so that it knows that the OS and software is still running on the system. If something catastrophic were to occur - like an NMI or under Windows some kind of blue-screen - the software will be unable to talk to the watchdog - at which point after a predetermined count down the hardware will automatically reset or reboot. This is a way for the hardware to get the system back up and running instead of being stuck in a hung condition. If an NMI occurs usually that can get logged in the Integrated Mangement Log - so if you don't see a log with NMI information then it was probably some other kind of failure. If for some reason you don't want this feature enabled then you can go into the bios/server configuration utility and disable it.

-Rich