Physical memory dumps

:D

Hi everyone,
can someone please help?
I am working at a place with a fair size network, about 1800 users, (topology is a mess though) and we are mainly running NT. We seem to be having a fair few Physical memory dumps both on Pcs and laptops. There seems to be no pattern to them and the specs are the same on most machines so it doesn't seem to be hardware.
I have been onto Microsoft's website and also looking through their monthly TechNet and all over the web but still no closer to why they happen or what to do to stop them happening. Usually a reboot fixes it. It's a bit of a buggeration so some help would be gratefully recieved....
Thanks to one and all.....


Twas brillig and the slithy.... (sorry, went off on one then)

Are all the machines patched up to date?
if not, goto http://corporate.windowsupdate.micro...en/default.asp
This will allow you to download all the patches to one machine / server then install onto all the machines from there (it saves downloading the same patch's multiple times)

J.

Thanks jcdux, will try that and see what happens!

:D
( guess I'd better convince my boss first though...)

your boss shouldn't need convincing, the patch's offer security & stability, ask your boss if either of those two are important to him, if they are, great, if not, go find another job with a less clueless boss.

:D

A couple of questions.

Do you have a fair number of applications that your company has developed internaly, or tweaked to meet their specific needs? Does your SW/Eng staff develop their own DLL's via some sort of DLL Maint app for users to `update' to the new set of DLL's?

The number one way to get NT to do a memdump is to address iomem that is reserved for the kernel or is being occupied by the kernel. The reason I ask the above questions is that our topology is also a mess, VMS, Solaris, AIX, Linux, NT 4.0, NT 3.5, Win2000, MAC, OS/2 , our SW/Eng that develop corp apps ( desktop ) stuff write or heavily tweak a lot of apps, even MS Office200. NT/200 systems seem to be memdumping pretty regularly (once every 120 days per desktop?).

Just a guess, but I would guess that your company is running something that the kernel *really* doesn't like. At my company the NT SW/Eng development team tried to resolve this by coding custom DLL's, which seemed to reolve the issue, until they made another change to the tweaked software that is.

So glad I am a *nix developer. :D

Solution = fire all NT programmers && install Linux on all machines.

Just kidding.

:D

Thanks guys, very grateful!

UberC0der, yeah we do have a couple of in house programs plus an American system which seems to be full of bugs! Will pass the information along.
(we still have a few Pc's dotted about with win 3.11 on)
Ahead of the times eh?)

I think your suggestion is a pretty good one! Yes the spirit of the BOFH is alive and well!