Server shuts down unexpectedly

[Good Companion]

Server
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
MSI KT3 Ultra 2 motherboard
1.768 GB RAM (PC 3200)
Western Digital WD1200JB-00DUA3 120 GB IDE HD (formatted NTFS)
Maxtor 6Y160P0 160 GB IDE HD (formatted NTFS)
WD 1 TB SATA HD (formatted NTFS)
Khypermedia 52x32x24x CDRW
Khypermedia 8x4x32 DVDRW
Realtek RTL8185 54M Wireless LAN Network Adapter
ADMtek AN983

This is my home server, which is basically set up to share files. I have it set up to turn on at a set time each day in the bios and shut down using shutdown.exe.

It was running fine for a while and all of a sudden, it's now turning off after a short period. My first thought was heat, so I pulled the side panel and that did not fix it. The power supply is relatively new, so I don't think that's it.

I did play with the power settings recently to try to save energy. I thought I set them back to "always on" but I'll double check.

Any other idea what this could be?

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

What clues do you get from the Event Manager for the time around the shutdown..?

Also, is it doing a 'clean' shutdown, or just falling over..?

[Good Companion]

Interesting. I checked event viewer earlier and found some errors, but none of them seemed to suggest that it would put the system into a shutdown. I just went to check it again so I could take a screenshot and it said my system log was corrupted. I've cleared it and I'll check again tomorrow night to see what it yields.

It's headless server, so I don't see any startup error messages. That said, when I remote into it, I see the standard windows desktop, so I assume I'm not getting the "Windows did not shut down properly" error on boot.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Yeah, if it decided that the shutdown wasn't good, then you'd get that message when the first person to log in logs in - regardless of whether that's locally or remotely...

One other thing to check would be the Scheduled Tasks window; it should tell you the last time it ran, and/or what the code/status of that attempt was...

[Good Companion]

I've attached a screen shot of both event viewer and scheduled tasks. As you can see, scheduled tasks seems to have run as directed. For event viewer, you can see that it turned itself on a 7:00 am, was on for a while and then drops off until I turn it back on at about 5:45 pm.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Can't see the 'last status' type column on the Scheduled Tasks window, and the event log only appears to show a start at around 07:01 in your output, as seen by what would be in the "eventlog" entries.

I'd suggest checking that it hasn't gone into sleep or standby mode...

[Good Companion]

Crap. I'll re-pdf them landscape. Sorry for the operator headspace and timing. I'll pull up the power settings as well. I THINK I have it set to spin down the hard drives, but not go to sleep.

Another thought I had was to ensure that the system clock didn't lose the correct time. My router was rebooting mid-day, which was exactly 9 hours earlier than it was supposed to. With no indication of what time zone the router uses, I figured that it must be set in the firmware to UTC or something like that ...

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Think you might find that, without a time server set, it would just use whatever time it happened to be powered up in the first place - which may or may not tie in with what your local time happens to be....set yourself up with a NTP server in the router, so that you at least have an accurate time point for that... Not that I expect that to have any relevance to the other issue/s you've got...

One other thing that I'd do, would be to check whether changing that setting to never do any power saving, would resolve the issue regarding the 'shutdown' that you're experiencing...at least we would then know whether changing that make the 'shutdown' stop, so that we can try changing it back to reproduce the situation...
(There's little point in changing a load of schtuffs in one move, as then you wouldn't know what solved it - though, as mentioned/suggested earlier in this post, I would be surprised if the router time was responsible for the 'shutdown' problem)

[Good Companion]

Sorry for the late response, but I got caught up with work and home stuff. I still have the server shutting off unexpectedly. I've uploaded landscape versions of the event log and scheduled events.

I found a setting for the router to set it to my time zone, so that's no longer an issue. For the server, I currently have the following power settings:

Home/Desktop
Shut down HDs after 5 mins
System standby in 15 mins
No Hibernation
No UPS

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Hmm...don't see anything in the logs (though they aren't complete, time-wise) that indicates anything to delve into....

If possible, perhaps you could save the log as a file, then save it somewhere that can be accessed remotely (given that it could contain data you might not want shared, you could store it on something like DropBox and PM the link to me and/or others to look at) so that we can see a wider range of times than you can print to PDF....

It would also be beneficial if you could do this and indicate a period that it wasn't responding/etc, and when it started again, so that we can try to see what's going on during that time...



I still think it would be a good idea to change the power settings to "Always On" so that it doesn't shut anything down [drives, screen, itself, etc] to confirm whether that stops the 'shutdown'....and then we can work backwards..
I've got a suspicion that it is possibly the 'System standby' that is causing it, but it could be something else - having the event log would confirm things a bit more...