Basic services irregularly crash - no noticeable cause

Question

After 3 years of smooth operation, one of our servers (Windows Server 2003) started to fail at random times. No authentication, remote login or net share accesses are then possible.

Taking a look at the services list, many of the basic services such as the net logon, computer browser and workstation service are stopped. After restarting the services, everything seems to be working. Also, after a server restart, everything is working correctly for some days.

I can't think of any change that could've caused this. The server is fully updated, no viruses were found.

As there are no relevant entries in the error logs before the failure, I can't think of a quick way to locate the cause of the error.

Is it possible to log service crashs to the event log and restart the failing services automatically? What could be the cause of the malfunctions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Memory going bad? Singular corrupted file? Bad packet of data? Bad update from software vendor? ... the list can go on forever. Unfortunately, without more information about the crash... there is no way to tell. Typically any running service that crashes should report something in the error log. Without even knowing what service crashed... I can't even tell you how to enable logging.

So... enough with the "obfuscation" ... just spit it out. What service(s) crashed... and how do you know it crashed?