The other evening our web server (IIS 5, Win2k SP4)
appeared to stop. However the IISAdmin and WWW services
were still running when we investigated the issue.
When this issue arose no more entries got placed in the
IIS logs. Our Perfmon logs also showed that all activity
appeared to stop at this time, CPU activity, GET requests,
Bytes sent all dropped off to almost zero.
IIS did appear to hold onto its connections. At time of
problem there were 107 Anon conxs. This remained until we
reset the machine the following morning despite no
activity evident in the IIS and Perfmon logs after the
issue arose.
When we found the services running we performed an
iisreset. The issadmin service stopped and started
successfully, however the WWW Publishing service was in
starting state, at this point the System returned
a 'unexpected error' message on the screen and indicated
the Server would restart within 1 minute.
Upon reboot everything seemed to be OK again but we are
perplexed as to what caused this crash and why doing an
iisreset caused an issue. We have used iisreset many times
before when deploying new code. I Would be very grateful
if anyone could help.