I have resolved all issues I had so far with ISA by tweaking, using workarounds etc. But the last thing which completely drives me crazy is that firewall just stops working (not processing any rules) after everyt couple of hours.I go to services and restart firewall service and everything goes back to normal after that. Again, I don't do "any" changes to make it work, just start and stop. That's the huge problem becouse I'm not on site and use TS to administer box which of course fails as well.
Any ideas which might be causing it? I mean "ANY" becouse I would look at any possibility to solve the problem before they will cut my head off for that.

Greg

Some people that have had similar issues have said that if they replace their NICs with Intel Pro 100+ and use the latest drivers from the Intel site, that they have had some success with similar problems.

HTH,
Tom

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http://www.isaserver.org/shinder/



Get It Here!

If you can't find anything else, you might try starting from scratch. Obviously this should not be expected, but when you're facing possibly hours of forensics, an hour re-installing and configuring ISA from scratch might be an alternative. But if it doesn't solve the problem, you're not making progress.

I don't know what else to suggest other than more detective work, or take a shot at starting over and hope the mystery doesn't recurr.

Again, I don't like to advocate voodoo server administration, but it sounds like you've got no other clues and that making it work is more important than understanding why it doesn't.

Shortly after I put my ISA server in production, I began to have a problem where the server would just reboot itself. It got to be twice a day. It never happened in the lab, but there I was with a mysterious problem, no clues, and at risk of my solution failing and its reputation being trashed after I worked so hard on it.

After one long night in the lab, I discovered the 4th DIMM in the server was bad. It had been passing diagnostics but was actually the incorrect part. I guess the lab never stressed the server enough to cause the failure, but in production it would. I replaced the DIMM and the server hasn't been down since.

Greg

If you have those NICs, make sure you use the Intel drivers from the Intel site. Reports are that it works wonders!

HTH,
Tom

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http://www.isaserver.org/shinder/



Get It Here!

When I restart my ISA server, everything works fine for a couple of hours. Then the problem occurs again. There are no errors in the eventlog and the ISA services are still running.

I use a W2k advanced server sp2 with a 3com905c and a rtl8029 NIC

I reinstalled the ISA server 3 (!) times, but no effect.....

When I restart my ISA server, everything works fine for a couple of hours. Then the problem occurs again. There are no errors in the eventlog and the ISA services are still running.

I use a W2k advanced server sp2 with a 3com905c and a rtl8029 NIC

I reinstalled the ISA server 3 (!) times, but no effect.....

How about a Serivce Pack 1 for this baby...

Greg

Here is what I have done and seems it works.

In your DNS server address for the external ip interface card :-
Put 1. In the DNS server of your ISP DNS server
2. In the alternate DNS server entry put, the local DNS server ip no, the one in your LAN.

Try to switch off power management option on Intel network card. It helps.

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Regards,
John S.
isatest@altavista.com

Using onboard NICs (Intel as external and Broadcom as internal)

Have an open PSS call with MS but no resolution yet.

Latest thing I tried after reading this thread was to disable QoS. Will see what happens. So far uptime is 01:55.

Is it normal for memory usage of W3PROXY.EXE to constantly keep increasing? It keeps increasing by about 4K or bigger increments ever 2 ~ 3 seconds. But it never seems to come down.

I imagine on a system with normal memory (256/512 mb etc) this could cause serious problems.

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Regards,
Jez
email: jez@ateallthepies.com
www: www.ateallthepies.com

Actually it just died again while I was typing this post. About 02:15 uptime. QoS was turned off on the NICs, power management is all off. W3Proxy.exe usage was about 130 megs when it died.

Once it stops working, you cannot ping anything except all the local IPs of the ISA from ISA itself and nothing from the outside can ping it. No traffic comes in and out of the NICs. About 50% of the time you cannot do a graceful shutdown. Remaining 50% of the time you can. In fact you can even just stop and start the ISA services and it comes back online.

I think there are multiple problems. The memory usage of W3Proxy is one problem and this issue is probably another.

When W3proxy starts on my server, right off the bat its using about 88 megs.

Jez, I take it on your server there are no freezes at all. If there are how far apart are they and how heavily does the server get used?

thanks,

Shahid

quote:

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Originally posted by Shahid Sheikh:
And after changing (disabling QoS) its gotten much worse. Now it doesn't last more than 30 minutes. stopped working three times in last 2 hours.

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Well disabling QoS definetely stopped my problem with dying server. It's been running for several month now without any problem. I guess we had the different problem.

During my troubleshooting I found out that it was just the internal network that the ISA server would quit talking to. The outside machines it could still ping and talk to fine. My internal NIC was the BroadCom NetXtreme gigabit (junk) that comes embedded on the PowerEdge 2550. Waited 5 hours last night for the server to halt but it didn't. Apparently it only happens when there are several users using it instead of just one users heavily browsing the web which explains why I didn't see the problem in the 1 week I was testing it with a few test users.

Finally I got tired of waiting, disabled the BroadCom, stuck a 3c905c in there as the internal NIC, re-enabled QoS on both NICs in use, and now the server has been running all night and so far today.

Until today it had been freezing every morning since its been put in production use. So fingers are crossed and lets see what happens.

As for W3Proxy.exe using large amount of memory, apparently it will use up upto the amount of physical memory available but should stop there and stay at that level. If at that point some other application starts up that uses large amounts of memory then you may start swapping but as long as its just proxy running, you should be fine.

[This message has been edited by Shahid Sheikh (edited 08 November 2001).]

We had the same issue and resolved it by changing DSL providers. Since then, we have'nt an issue!

What also changed is the router.