When you say shut down... do you mean "crash" or cleanly shut down?

Firstly, You should check to see if there are any crashdumps in c:\windows\system32\minidumps

I think thats the folder (otherwise just google windows minidumps for location information)

If the server is crashing, you will find crashdumps there.

You may also see when it reboots that "Windows recovered from a serious problem" or something similar.


The other possibility may be cooling. If you have suddenly started using this web server as a db server, and alot of CPU activity is going on, you will need adequate cooling for the high CPU usage. You should install some temperature monitoring tools. If the temperture is exceeding the hardware shutdown thresholds, then your server maybe shutting down because of this. (and you wont always get a warning or a nice clean shutdown) The fact that you say its a pretty consistent amount of time before the shutdown, doesn't suggest a crash, but more one of a cooling nature.

btw. you should not really use the web server as the db server as well (thats not very good practice, and will most likely lead to degraded performance...)

One more possibility you should investigate is attacks on the server. You said this is a web server. Is it on a public IP? Are you using a firewall to lock down ports and ONLY use ones that you need from the outside? What is the patch level of the server?

Thanks for the reply.

The machine was shutting down cleanly and after going through the event viewer I found out that the server was shutting itself down every 60 minutes because it wanted to be the domain controller.

I'm currently googling what all this means (