Domino crashes straight back to power up

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi,

Wondering if anyone can help with suggestions on why my application server crashes. It is unusual in that the server goes right back to power up - so nothing appears to be written to any log files.

It was running R5 and crashing periodically. Then I noticed it crash when I attempted to index an applications help database. After that, it would crash when domino was starting and loading that help database so I removed it from the data directory as it wasn’t essential. Although I have no problems with this file on the test server.

After that it settled down for a while. Just recently it has started crashing again. I upgraded it to R6 - but server kept crashing while running nupdall -RX and ncompact -K, so didn’t even get to start Domino.

I deinstalled R5 and did a clean install of R6. Domino started fine. So I stopped it and put back some of the smaller databases and started domino. Once again it was running fine. Stopped it, and put back a suite of applications that approx 35 - 45 remote user’s replicate to every 15 minutes. Started domino and it ran fine for about 5 to 10 minutes and then crashed again. So I temporarily disabled replication on the applications where my users have local replicas, and the server ran fine again. I stopped Domino once more and put the last of our applications back into the data directory and restarted domino. Domino crashed during startup when it got to one of the applications. So I removed it from the data directory. Restarted domino and it was stable. I had our head office in the States re-replicate back down the database that I had removed, and domino crashed. So they replicated it to our mail server instead and it is running fine from there.

I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions or comments on this situation. The server is stable at the moment, but only because I have one of the applications running on the mail server, and the suite of applications that my remote users have local replicas off, have had their replication temporarily disabled. Also, if you are standing in front of the server when it crashes, it is just like the power has been turned off as it goes straight back to startup.

Thank-you,

Jacinta (New Zealand)

PS: I have searched both the R6 and R5 forums for crashes and reboots, but none of the posts seem to be similar to the type of crash my application server is doing. It is running W2k, SP 4 and has 1/2 gig of memory.

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Subject: Domino crashes straight back to power up

Jacinta, It sounds like it could be hardware? If you could swap out the RAM, CPU, or even replace the box that might be the solution:-jmw

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Subject: Domino crashes straight back to power up

Well the server is now stable with no error messages … here is a run down of what was done.

One of the application was moved temporarily to our mailserver as Domino wouldn’t even start while this resided in the data directory. My head office administrator in the US re-replicated the database down from the master server, but this caused the server to crash. So she deleted the partial replica and setup replication again to happen with scheduled replication instead of immediate. She monitored this and it took several replications as it kept timing out - so she gradually increased the replication time until the database was fully replicated. Once this was done the database appeared to work fine.

With the suite of applications that have local client replicas, these were turned on one-by-one to determine which particular database was causing the server to crash. It took a bit to work out which user’s replica, but this was determined as we have an office 2 hours behind, and it was crashing when they came on-line. We tidied up some of the documents created by the user who’s local replica was causing errors and then got that person to replicate. The database was stable, but causing index errors. Deleted and recreated the index.

The server now appears to be stable. Not sure exactly what was wrong.