Re: Workstations are going offline! Help!

Hi Dave - Yup, things are back to normal. It is the strangest thing I
think I have ever seen.
IIS did recover. Otherwise company web or OWA wouldn't work, right?
They are working fine.

I'll definately keep an eye out for these machines and look at the AV
too.

I ran RSOP & the minimum password age is 0 & the maximum password is 0
age. Doesn't that mean that they never expire? Basically, when the
user logged on, it would say - User is required to change password
after first logon, then bring up a change password box. It did this
for everyone but administrator.....

I really appreciate all of your help with these issues.

Dave Nickason [SBS MVP] wrote:
So is everything working normally now? Did IIS recover (or at least
services started when you asked them to) and is it now working?

This is what I would do: keep an eye on those workstations to make sure
nothing is going on that shouldn't be. Particularly that all services are
running that should be. If you run into any future weirdness, troubleshoot
that. I'd start with Symantec, because AV is often behind strange behavior,
and because I always look at 3rd party stuff first. (The reason for this is
that we all run Windows, Office, and lots of other Microsoft apps and
services, so if a problem is caused by an MS app, it's often common enough
that the cause is immediately obvious). Any service that crashes should
generate a log entry, as should any service that tries to start and fails.
Event logs are the first place to go for troubleshooting services for that
reason.

As for the password thing, it would be nice to know why that happened. From
your workstation, do Start -> Run -> rsop.msc. This will run a Resultant
Set of Policy that will tell all the group policies applied to your user
account on that machine. Navigate through Computer Configuration -> Windows
Settings -> Security Settings and click Password Policy. Hopefully the
Maximum Password Age entry will tell you what happened.

Hopefully that IIS thing was a fluke, but if it's not working and a service
won't start, or if you're seeing any symptoms, please check your event logs
and post back what you see there.


"catphishum" <catphishum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1166716268.879017.55830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Okay - Day 2.
I come in this morning & all three workstations have been magically
placed into a state where they are able to be a part of the network
again. No errors on startup, no offline icons, synchronizing is
working, audio is back, etc.

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!! every user in the network received a message that
they must create a new password after first login and were forced to
create new passwords. This is strange because I have not enforced a
password policy on the network as of yet. So, I trot to the server
closet & go to login & I get an immediate application error of IIS
Worker Process failing. So, I look in the event logs & at about 10PM
last night, the error - Faulting application w3wp.exe, version
6.0.3790.1830, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.2.3790.1830, fault
address 0x000224b2. - There are no other errors in the application or
system logs.

I don't know what in the world is going on!

I am of course happy that these workstations are mysteriously online
again, but what happens when they go biserk again?




stephen wrote:
Dave Nickason [SBS MVP] wrote:
Brian - please stop changing settings experimentally. Hopefully you've
noted anything you're doing with NIC drivers, etc. so you can undo it.
Presumably you have identically or very similarly configured
workstations,
of which most work. And, you can ping, so it's unlikely to be a NIC
thing.

With a dozen or more services not starting, you've got a problem that's
unrelated to drivers or group policy settings. Again, remember group
policy
is applying to the working PCs too, so if it were group policies,
nothing
would work.

Dave,

I have the same nic as Brian's workstations in my laptop and I've seen
the exact same symptoms as far as losing access to shares goes (Broadcom
NetXtreme). When offline files are in use and you are offline (but still
connected to the network) access to shares and printers disappears even
though other TCP/IP things like ping still work. This is probably
designed behaviour.

The root problem is why your PC goes offline in the first place, and the
problem "You experience intermittent communication failure between
computers that are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003" addressed
in http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=904946 may be the reason why an
offline state is detected at all.

The solution given is to disable checksum offloading by modifying a
registry parameter. This can also be done in the nic driver settings,
and touch wood, it seems to have done the trick for me.

Granted, I don't have a whole slew of failed services on my laptop, but
I did experience the other behaviour. Maybe Brian's problem is
different, may be he has more than one problem, but you cannot rule out
nic issues given the behaviour I have described and the MS KB.


-- stephen


.

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