As you can probably tell, I was a little bit pissed off when I wrote that last post.
Now, less than 7 hours later, I wanted to check on the status of my Windows Server 2008 machine. Already the activity LEDs on my Corsair RAMs were giving the tell-tale “zero usage with flashing spikes” indication.
Login worked. Launching the task manager worked, too. 1,92 GB memory load (out of 2 GB I have installed). Of course, no process was consuming that much memory (and login plus launching the Task Manager was extraordinarily quick)
The task bar only showed the hour glass cursor. Task Manager also had yet to show up in the task bar.
The first thing I did was use the task manager to kill Halite.exe, my BitTorrent client. Kill Process — “Are you sure” — yes. Process still runs.
After about 3 minutes of sitting and killing, the case was clear: My server was sitting like a dead fish in the water. It had paged out absolutely everything despite no memory actually being used.
There is no hope of of waiting this out. It wouldn’t make any progress if I gave it hours. No choice but to hit the reset button once more.
After rebooting, I waited (that’s what Windows Server 2008 is all about — waiting — mostly for something to fail) until the “Routing and Remote Access Service” launched. Clicked connect on my PPPoE uplink. Connecting 1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…9…10…
Now I know from experience that if it hasn’t connected by 5, it’ll happily count away to 30 or so and then tell me some useless error code. I clicked cancel. My next click on Connect resulted in the (for me, well-known) “invalid username or password” error message.
I also know this from experience, this error message (which is WRONG by the way) will pop up whenever I connect now, even if I turn off my PPPoE modem. No choice but to reboot.
The sorry piece of **** is turned off for now. You cannot run Windows Server 2008 unattended. Period. Luckily my PPPoE modem has an integrated NAT router (that’s based on Linux and crashes about once a week). Gotta go to work now…
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