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Thread ID: 48716 2004-08-30 09:55:00 Urgent! Win2k server problem - RPC and lsass crash, handle is invalid george12 (7) Press F1
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267093 2004-08-30 09:55:00 Hi, I am having a lot of strife with my two-day-old installation of Windows 2000 Advanced Server Evaluation (120-day) with SP4.

It's on one of my 2 new servers, both identical 333Mhz Celeron w/64MB RAM and a 3GB Western Digital HDD. I installed windows fresh on this computer, and then duplicated the hard drive for the other one (and changed the MAC address, ip address, name etc to make it do what I wanted).

My problem is that with the first one, I am having no end of problems. RPC has crashed twice, using 100% cpu and causing clients on the internet to get:

The handle is invalid.

...when they try to goto a site hosted on the server. I know it worked before RPC crashed because I have had people go to it.

I rebooted which fixed RPC, but just now the error is back.

What do I do? Note that I had no problems before SP4 but then I only ran it without SP4 for about a day.

Try it yourself, try these addresses:

http://local.jgih.com (JG Industries e-shop)
http://local.thestagegame.com (The Stage Game)
http://222.152.55.106 (Default site when no host headers - basicly empty)

My IP address is of course static, so the third one won't change.

The hosted versions of these sites are available by replacing the 'local' with 'www'.

Curiously the Stage Game site has never failed. But I can confirm that there is nothing wrong with either of the other to (like a scripting error). But there could be something in that the shop (first in list) is ASP, and the intranet (3rd in list) is ASP, but the working Stage Game site is plain old html.

Also, I forgot, when I try to administrate IIS it says 'JG-SRV2 - Access is denied' even though it IS that computer. Arg

Thanks in advance,
George 		george12 (7)
267094 2004-08-30 11:53:00 bump Laura (43)
267095 2004-08-30 11:56:00 ** bump ** stu120404 (268)
267096 2004-08-31 03:37:00 I'd run a memory tester first .

Is 64MB enough for W2k advanced server? How busy is the disk? :D 		Graham L (2)
267097 2004-08-31 10:05:00 The swap file was maxed out, I found, and increasing it to 384m initial and 768m max seemed to fix the general stability problems, but it still won't serve properly. george12 (7)
267098 2004-09-01 03:03:00 I'm not surprised . :O "Improved" software (such as SPs) is always bigger .

I'd still have a go with a memory test . Then put in another stick of memory . ;-) I'm sure MS would recommend a lot more than 64MB, even if they say it's the "minumum" amount .

A "handle" is the way you get to reach data etc . If that's invalid, it can be disastrous . That's why MS actually \check them, so you get an error message . :D Either you've got a handle and it's put in a bad memory location, or you haven't got one (so would get a zero value -- which is always invalid) . There must be a log file for the server . . . have a look at that .

But the access problem might be significant . If you can't manage the server, you might not be able to get handles . 		Graham L (2)
267099 2004-09-01 08:07:00 Hi guys, great news. The servers serves again.

I discovered to my horror that there was such a shortage of RAM (3MB free) that processes were simply being denied the memory they needed. This fully explains every random crash, and invalid handle in IIS.

I added another stick to have 128MB and 96MB in the other server, and they both work properly now. The 128MB one runs Exchange 2000, DNS, DHCP and IIS and the 96MB one is mostly as a backup, but also serves DNS.

Goto http://local.jgih.com and you should see it working perfectly.

Thanks for the help,
George 		george12 (7)
267100 2004-09-01 11:42:00 Great news indeed, george.
Glad you're up & running happily.
Hope you don't mind if I suggest you check the spelling of *available* on the homepage - just to look professional... 		Laura (43)
267101 2004-09-02 05:36:00 Once upon a time, 64MB on a 386 running on a server would have been amazing. (In fact there probably wouldn't have been room for that much ion the board). A 64MB diisk would have been a desirable item.

These days, I suppose it's amazing that they worked at all ... :D 		Graham L (2)
267102 2004-09-02 05:41:00 *gulp* thanks for that Laura. Fixing it now. It really is great not to have to upload anything when you finish updating :).

Thanks for all the help
George 		george12 (7)
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