Wingate frequent hanging

[pecos]

It didn't work for me either.

[udara]

HI
I am running wingate v5.2.2 on a Celeron 2.4GZ, 512Ram, win2k/SP3 with 2 net cards (Inter and LAN). 10 Lan users.
NAT, Proxy, Socks ,cache running, all log files off.
My problem is every 1-2 hours wingate stops responding and pc stucks, restart of the pc is the only way to make it work again.
Another thing is when wingate hangs, I can not ping the LAN card (and the inter card also) from a local comp.

Please help to slove this.
Thanks

[saubrey]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

[adrien]

HI
I am running wingate v5.2.2 on a Celeron 2.4GZ, 512Ram, win2k/SP3 with 2 net cards (Inter and LAN). 10 Lan users.
NAT, Proxy, Socks ,cache running, all log files off.
My problem is every 1-2 hours wingate stops responding and pc stucks, restart of the pc is the only way to make it work again.
Another thing is when wingate hangs, I can not ping the LAN card (and the inter card also) from a local comp.

Please help to slove this.
Thanks

Hi

Thanks for this extra information. The only way I can figure that WinGate hanging breaks ping, would be if the ENS gets stuck in a loop or blocks somehow.

We did see a couple of cases whilst we were working on the release ENS driver for 5.2.2 with this sort of behaviour, but I thought we fixed them before we released 5.2.2. We did find some other problems in the 5.2.2 ENS, which we fixed also for 5.2.3. They are to do with cleaning up timed out connection entries.

I will have another closer look at this area of the code again and report back

Adrien

[udara]

But I dont have any other soft installed, only wingate 5.2.2.
I will try to install wingate 5.2.3 and try.
Thanks

[andrewclark]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

That's interesting, and fuels a suspicion I have also.
Mine froze again overnight, and again the last Event Log entry was just a few minutes before Norton was scheduled to kick in and do a system scan.

I'll disable Norton for the next 24 hours and see what I can glean from that.

Adrien/Pascal - any thoughts on this possibility?

[udara]

I uninstalled 5.2.2 and installed 5.2.3. Now working for almost 6 hours without restarting. I think the problem is with this 5.2.2 version. Dont know for sure, have to wait and see.

[adrien]

I uninstalled 5.2.2 and installed 5.2.3. Now working for almost 6 hours without restarting. I think the problem is with this 5.2.2 version. Dont know for sure, have to wait and see.

Hi

We think this looping issue would only happen on multi CPU machines, or machines running Hyper-threading (such as P4 on XP). Are you running a system like this?

A

[adrien]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

That's interesting, and fuels a suspicion I have also.
Mine froze again overnight, and again the last Event Log entry was just a few minutes before Norton was scheduled to kick in and do a system scan.

I'll disable Norton for the next 24 hours and see what I can glean from that.

Adrien/Pascal - any thoughts on this possibility?

Hi

We definitely have seen issues when using a real-time scanning program if it scans the same directories that WinGate uses.

Also we find that during periods of scanning, the system can (depending on its CPU etc) be under heavy load, and certain things can start timing out internally in WinGate because it may be getting starved of CPU.

[andrewclark]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

That's interesting, and fuels a suspicion I have also.
Mine froze again overnight, and again the last Event Log entry was just a few minutes before Norton was scheduled to kick in and do a system scan.

I'll disable Norton for the next 24 hours and see what I can glean from that.

Adrien/Pascal - any thoughts on this possibility?

Hi

We definitely have seen issues when using a real-time scanning program if it scans the same directories that WinGate uses.

Also we find that during periods of scanning, the system can (depending on its CPU etc) be under heavy load, and certain things can start timing out internally in WinGate because it may be getting starved of CPU.

I have manually set the Wingate\Logs directory to be excluded from scans, but from what you say it would be better to exclude the whole Wingate tree?

As to CPU starvation, this is a new machine with an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor on a very fast Gigabyte board - and doing nothing else overnight except checking for mail every 10 mins.

I am currently running a test with the AV Autoprotect disabled and have changed the Full system scan to run at 0300 instead of 0200. It#s been fine all day. If it crashes tonight I will be able to see when from the event log. I won't change anything else until that test is complete, and will let you know the result.

[voman]

Hi

We definitely have seen issues when using a real-time scanning program if it scans the same directories that WinGate uses.

Also we find that during periods of scanning, the system can (depending on its CPU etc) be under heavy load, and certain things can start timing out internally in WinGate because it may be getting starved of CPU.

I´ve been using wingate 5.2 with NAV 2004 with absolutely no problem since december.
My system is 750Mhz DURON cpu, 1 on board SIS 900 NIC, 1 realtec PCI NIC, 250Mb RAM, windows XP pro, NAV 2004, NAT, Proxy, Socks, cache running, all log files off. NAV is set to scan incoming mail, and weekly complete scan.
I´ve between 10 to 20 users logged from 08:00h to 18:00h using mostly HTTP and POP/SMTP. Moreover I´ve some eventual bittorrent traffic and one radio streaming permanently connected.
3 MONTHS WITHOUT ANY DOWN TIME.

[andrewclark]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

That's interesting, and fuels a suspicion I have also.
Mine froze again overnight, and again the last Event Log entry was just a few minutes before Norton was scheduled to kick in and do a system scan.

I'll disable Norton for the next 24 hours and see what I can glean from that.

Adrien/Pascal - any thoughts on this possibility?

Hi

We definitely have seen issues when using a real-time scanning program if it scans the same directories that WinGate uses.

Also we find that during periods of scanning, the system can (depending on its CPU etc) be under heavy load, and certain things can start timing out internally in WinGate because it may be getting starved of CPU.

I have manually set the Wingate\Logs directory to be excluded from scans, but from what you say it would be better to exclude the whole Wingate tree?

As to CPU starvation, this is a new machine with an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor on a very fast Gigabyte board - and doing nothing else overnight except checking for mail every 10 mins.

I am currently running a test with the AV Autoprotect disabled and have changed the Full system scan to run at 0300 instead of 0200. It#s been fine all day. If it crashes tonight I will be able to see when from the event log. I won't change anything else until that test is complete, and will let you know the result.

Update:

It didn't crash overnight, with Norton AV off, but has crashed twice during the day.

I am keeping a detailed log of what is and isn't running, by the hour.

I thought I had the problem narrowed down to Norton Autoprotect, but then it crashed whilst that was off and not memory-resident.

I am now looking at Outlook 2003 as a contributing factor/cause.

[pecos]

I noted earlier that when Wingate is "frozen" the server machine cannot retrieve web pages even by bypassing the WWW proxy server, whereas the client machine can receive pages through NAT.

I just want to add that bypassing the proxy does work on the server machine when the Wingate engine is stopped and when it is working properly. So whatever is happening is blocking all web access on the server machine without affecting the rest of the network.

Adrien, I sent you a couple more lock dump analysis files.

--Tom

[Pascal]

Tom, Adrien is away for a week or so. Is it possible for you to post those to me too, please ?

[pecos]

Pascal,

They're on their way to you now.

--Tom

[Pascal]

Okay, those lock files only contain age warnings. They are not serious - all they indicate is that it took longer than expected to obtain a lock on one of the objects.

Larry discovered an interesting scenario on his setup a few days ago. When you experience the problem again, can you try two things for me, please.

1. Stop the DNS Service and then start it again. (From GateKeeper). If that does not resolve the problem, go to step 2.

2. Stop the WWW Service and then start it again.

Larry's problem 'seems' to be DNS related, but we've not tracked it down yet. Yours is slightly different as the client still seems to work (Hence step 2) but better to investigate all possible avenues.

[xgorrea]

I think I have the same problem described by pecos.

This is the scenario:
- Proxy providing Internet access(www,FTP) to 200 users.
- Wingate ver.5.2.0 running on a Windows 2000 Server SP4.
- BW of Internet connection: 512 Kbps

We are having problems with the www proxy services: Several times a day the Internet navigation is interrupted for a period of 2-3 minutes, starting to work after a while.
We have not detected the origin of this behavior.
On the other hand, our ISP says that the Proxy Server sometimes has reached a large numbre of connections established to Internet (9000).
Do you think is that number of sessions too large according to the scenario described above?

Also, when monitoring system network performance (Windows Performance Monitor/ TCP), i get:

TCP
Connections Active 592176,000
Connections Established 21,000
Connections Passive 599776,000

...what does it really mean? Are such number of Connections Active normal?

At the same time a 'netstat -an' command returns 245 entries (mainly in TIME_WAIT state).

Thanks

[pecos]

Okay, those lock files only contain age warnings. They are not serious - all they indicate is that it took longer than expected to obtain a lock on one of the objects.

Darn. I was hoping they would shed some light on the situation.

1. Stop the DNS Service and then start it again. (From GateKeeper). If that does not resolve the problem, go to step 2.

2. Stop the WWW Service and then start it again.

Neither action produces any change.

Larry's problem 'seems' to be DNS related, but we've not tracked it down yet. Yours is slightly different as the client still seems to work (Hence step 2) but better to investigate all possible avenues.

If it's any help, when Wingate is in the "frozen" state I can still get DNS resolution. For example, when I ping www.qbik.com I see that it is being resolved to 202.180.113.232.

--Tom

[pecos]

OK, I made another discovery. I can't seem to turn on logging for the DNS Resolver. If I change the logging setting it has no effect, and nothing shows up in Gatekeeper.

Edit: Well, it did start logging after a slight delay (after the scheduled logfile rollover), but configuration changes for this service still aren't showing up in Gatekeeper.

--Tom

[andrewclark]

Not sure if this is helpful for this thread, but for me, Wingate 5.2.x became much more stable after I stopped using Norton AV Real time checking. I run Wingate on Win2k. I suspect that their may be a conflict between Norton and Wingate, but never ran enough tests to prove/disprove it, other than the fact that Wingate became more stable after I stopped using Norton.

That's interesting, and fuels a suspicion I have also.
Mine froze again overnight, and again the last Event Log entry was just a few minutes before Norton was scheduled to kick in and do a system scan.

I'll disable Norton for the next 24 hours and see what I can glean from that.

Adrien/Pascal - any thoughts on this possibility?

Hi

We definitely have seen issues when using a real-time scanning program if it scans the same directories that WinGate uses.

Also we find that during periods of scanning, the system can (depending on its CPU etc) be under heavy load, and certain things can start timing out internally in WinGate because it may be getting starved of CPU.

I have manually set the Wingate\Logs directory to be excluded from scans, but from what you say it would be better to exclude the whole Wingate tree?

As to CPU starvation, this is a new machine with an AMD Athlon 2800+ processor on a very fast Gigabyte board - and doing nothing else overnight except checking for mail every 10 mins.

I am currently running a test with the AV Autoprotect disabled and have changed the Full system scan to run at 0300 instead of 0200. It#s been fine all day. If it crashes tonight I will be able to see when from the event log. I won't change anything else until that test is complete, and will let you know the result.

Update:

It didn't crash overnight, with Norton AV off, but has crashed twice during the day.

I am keeping a detailed log of what is and isn't running, by the hour.

I thought I had the problem narrowed down to Norton Autoprotect, but then it crashed whilst that was off and not memory-resident.

I am now looking at Outlook 2003 as a contributing factor/cause.

Update 16/03/04

Cracked it.

I'm afraid it wasn't Wingate at all - sorry guys.

The installation of Wingate on my new server about 10 days after test running it just happened to coincide with a hardware problem.

I went to load another O/S clean onto a spare partition to trace the source of the problem and Bingo, the server failed whilst loading it.

Removing all the cards, connectors and memory and reseating them has cured the problem completely.

Moral: Never forget the obvious coincidence! If it can happen, in Computing it will do.

Rgds
Andrew

[ulenius]

Hi!
I have had the same problems (alsp for a long time).
Both with Windows NT SP6 as OS on the Wingate server machine and today with Windows XP pro and Wingare 5.2.3.
Hangings and/or service dropouts. Sometimes i can restart Wingate and sometiomes I have to restart the machine to get client access to work again.

I have had that gibblerish message written in the Gatekeeper message window. I have also seen that DNS service stos in 5.2.3 or that some services stops. Last time today when SMTP and www proxy services stopped and all other services kept on running? Strange??

I DO NOT HAVE ANY OFFICE SW INSTALLED ON MY SERVER BUT I HAVE F-SECURE.??

/Anders

PS You REALLY have to find this "old bug". A lead or just another problem that I have had is also a deadlock between Wingate and the file system.
I my network sometimes a client trues to access the file system on the server machine. That cleates a deadlock. Very disturbing. I have to restrict file access to my server....... but it is only when a XP client tries to access the files, not when a W98 or W2K tries???

[pecos]

I'm on my second day of running Wingate without a freezeup, after taking Microsoft Office out of the Startup folder--something that I hadn't suspected as a culprit because it had beeen there since the computer came from the factory. Still keeping my fingers crossed, though.

--Tom