I’ve reported on a number of occaisions about attempting reboots and those reboots just “hanging” until the server was power-cycled (or until you could execute a “shutdown” command from another computer in the environment – not always easy when connecting remotely!).
If you want to read those articles, you can find them here, here, and here.
It has appeared that the Scalable Networking Pack (SNP) had a role to play, and that Small Business Server (SBS) may have gotten the worst end of this stick, but it apparently turns out to have been a race condition in NTFS driver shutdown code.
Microsoft has released a number of patches over the last year to address this, but I can say that I’m finally happy with the last iteration of the patch. You can find that patch in this KB article: A Windows Server 2003-based computer stops responding when you shut down the computer in a remote console session.
I certainly won’t promise you that it solves all of the issues – but I’ve not seen a hang since I installed the last version of this patch. A version of the hotfix is available for both Windows Server 2003 sp1 and sp2.
Until next time…
As always, if there are items you would like me to talk about, please drop me a line and let me know!
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