Topic: Wy does my server crash at 11:00pm most days?

[Neil Fraser]

Hi all

Apologies if this has been covered before! I couldn't find any info in the forums so far...

I administer a SME 5.6 server but recetly it's been crashing at  11:00pm most nights. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it except that is always about the same time.

The logs don't give any error messages, but they are useful in determinig the time of failue

Anyone come across this before?

I today thought that it might be one of the clients - it's on a 10 user win98 / 2k /xp network but what would be a problem enough to bring the server to a complete halt - only power cycling helps?

TIA

Neil

[Byte]

Is there anything in your cron at that time?

Try checking...

/etc/cron.daily


Could be a clue there

Byte

[Klaus Eckert]

did you tell any service to update itself at this time?
good candidates are squid-guard or virus-scanner or something like that.

cheers klaus

[Michael Smith]

Any chance it's the good old cleaning service plugging in their amp-sucking vacuum cleaners and causing enough of a voltage drop to give your server a headache?

[Neil Fraser]

I've looked throught he cron entries but nothing obvious has turned up...

[Neil Fraser]

Do you know I've never seen a cleaner in this office! It doesn't look that dirty though so I will look into it - thanks.

[Neil Fraser]

I think I have found the culprit...

Tape backup is set to run at just after 9:00 pm. Having looked at the emails in the deleted folder of the person responsible for checking the backups it appears that they (the backups) have been failing since about mid July!!! The backups fail about half way through, which would be about 11:00pm.

Having poked around it seems to stall when copying one particularly big file (~0.5GByte). Moving that off the server may work - I'll let you know tomorrow...

Thanks for all the replies.

Neil

[Finchwizard]

I've heard the story with the cleaner before hehe

Or she comes along, pulls out the power to the server to plug her vaccum in hehe