[thelist] IIS falling down!

Michael Pemberton mpember at phreaker.net
Mon Aug 20 09:18:05 CDT 2001


I have found that some screen savers attempt to become "system savers"
and stop almost every device you can think of from doing it's thing.

This can involve everything from stopping your cdrom ejecting, to the
more annoying stopping of your modem / network connection and thus
risking idle time disconnection.

<tip type="Screen Savers" Author="Michael Pemberton">
Screen savers can often do more damage than good.  They were designed to
stop image burning on the old monitors with low refresh rates.

With the latest developments in monitor technology, the screens no
longer require saving.  If you don't need one for security / business
image purposes, you should disable your screen saver and enable power
saving.

This means that you save power and your screen at the same time and your
CPU doesn't go into overdrive drawing an animation that you don't even
look at.
</tip>

aardvark wrote:
> 
> > From: Steve Cook <steve.cook at evitbe.com>
> >
> > we've been having some strange behaviour from IIS on our Intranet
> > recently. Firstly, one machine running IIS 4 on NT4 (Small Business
> > Server) was refusing to respond on the www service when we started to
> > use it each morning. It seemed like the service was hanging if it was
> > left unused for a while. After trying everything we could think of
> > (not so much :-), we went around the problem by centralising all our
> > Intranet applications on another machine.
> 
> worth a shot, right?
> 
> there was a local ISP who's www service kept crapping out on their
> IIS box after, say, 30 minutes... they never saw it happen, and the
> box itself seemed fine...
> 
> what happened was that the 3D screen saver was creating some
> sort of conflict with the video card, and somehow causing all traffic
> to/from the box to die...  at least until the hit a key to stop the
> screen saver and see what was up (the www service appeared to
> be working fine once they could see it)...  it took them 2 weeks to
> believe us that there was a problem...
> 
> our solution was to get one of those long-necked chicken things
> with the bobbing head and set it over the space bar on the
> keyboard... ever 30 seconds or so, the beak would swing down and
> hit the space bar...  it was so much more fun than turning off the
> screen saver...
> 
> the gist is, if you don't see anything in the error logs, start looking
> for conflicts that could tie up traffic or processor cycles... make
> sure the cables are good and that it's not a router issue... if there is
> something in the error logs, look for patterns, and then do what you
> do best...
> 
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-- 
Michael Pemberton
mpember at phreaker.net
ICQ: 12107010





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