ATTENTION! Gatekeeper does not open correctly! -URGENT

[NickyDJ]

Hi everybody!
I' m running WinGate 6.0.1 Build 995, with my official license. After insatallation it seemed to everything ok, but after 2 days my Windows server 2003 (machine with WinGate) was blocked accidentally! After a restart, WinGate makes the CPU work for over 50% and i'm not able to enter GateKeeper correctly: i'm able to login to Gatekeeper but the interface is with no panels! So i cannot change my parameters and check the WinGate functionality!
I decided to uninstall and resinstall WinGate (reconfiguring everything!) but after 2 days again WinGate stopped accidentally and GateKeeper is unuseful ... and my CPU (Xeon 2.4Ghz) is over 50%.... Moreover it's strange WinGate service starts after more then 1 minute, while it usually keeps a few seconds to start!
Please help me.... i should uninstall all WinGate once again to use GateKeeper even if WinGate service is running (with CPU usage over the normal usage!).
Kind Regards
Nicola

[Pascal]

That sounds like a history database corruption. Try stopping the WinGate engine and GateKeeper, then moving the History.* files from the WinGate folder to another. This will force WinGate to recreate them when it next starts up.

[HenriLemmers]

Hi Nicola and Pascal,

I like to add to the experience of Nicola. I also am using build 995 (but also the preceding versions) on Windows Server 2003 (Dual Xeon 2.8). Ever since the first install, I experience spontaneous reboots every 1-2 days (and twice a simple freeze). There has only once been a period of one week when no problems occured, but this ended after a reboot to change a setting on my Diva-ISDN card. The reboots seem to be related to internet activity (NAT with Transp. Redir. for KAV), because the reboots I can pin down occur during internet activity from one of my five client machines. Indeed on these reboots the History database gets corrupted most of the times, at one time it got in a loop, and ket on scrolling through the whole database. but I have reset (renamed) it ever since.
I wonder how we can tackle the problem most efficiently.

Henri

[Pascal]

Does your system automatically reboot when it gets a blue-screen? The first thing to do would be to make it not do that, so we can get an idea of the module that causes it. The second step then, if it was in one of the Qbik drivers (qbikhk*.xxx) then we'd try and work out from the information on the screen where that was in the code.

The history database problem, like you said, will most likely occur on a spontaneous reboot (Whether through a blue-screen, power failure, etc.) The next maintenance release does have a better history startup system to account for this - but obviously the main problem here is - reboot.

[NickyDJ]

Hi Pascal!
Thank you very much, i deleted the history.* files and and now i'm able to enter the GateKeeper interface correctly!
But as you said the main problem (reboot) remains, and as you asked, after the blu screen my system automatically reboots after a memory problem (described into the blu screen). I will disable the automatic reboot and i'll tell you the description of the problem if it happens once again... Meanwhile now i know how to access the GateKeeper....

Regards
Nicola

[Pascal]

Hi Nicola,

Thanks for that. If you can, when it blue-screens it will create a minidump file as well (I'll check the exact location of the file with Genie, he's our driver guru). From the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Each additional file is given a distinct name. The date is encoded in the file name. For example, Mini022900-01.dmp is the first memory dump generated on February 29, 2000. A list of all small memory dump files is kept in the %SystemRoot%\Minidump folder.

If that happens, and you can save that file for us, it would be awesome. That helps tremendously in tracking these kinds of problems down.

[HenriLemmers]

Hello Pascal,

Last night was a freeze again. I do have three minidump files I will send to you by mail, however my reboots have been more often. The latest minidump was this timestamped this morning at 1:15 local time, but my eventviewer does not indicate a shutdown/startup at that time. The frozen state started after 15:40, the latest time recorded in eventviewer (security). As for the blue screen, indeed the server does automatic reboot, which I will turn off also.

Henri

[HenriLemmers]

Hello Pascal and Gene,

It has been quite a while, but my server has been running for more than 20 days non stop, before I had to bring it down for a windows update.
You were concerned about a driver conflict in my Diva-server ISDN adapter. The only thing I have done up to now is installing "driver verifier (verifier.exe)" on Windows Server 2003 to check on pool usage and so on of my Dimaint.sys, Diport.sys, Diwansrv.sys and Capi20.sys drivers. As far as I can tell, there have been no errors, but no blue screens either, ever since.
The only other thing which may have changed, is windows diskmirroring which was reduced to only the system partition, instead of system plus one (smaller) data partition on the same drive. The latter combination slowed down rebuild after a sudden stop to much.
For now I think my blue screen problem is over, if it returns on unistalling "verifier" I will come back on this.

Thanks for your help,

Henri