[thelist] IIS falling down!

[aardvark]

> 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...