~ overflow ~

- this issue has been resolved check bottom of this posting if you only want to know what was it -

afd.sys, apparently, is a winsock helper, wich likes to crash, i’ve been doing some research on this matter, but so far, i haven’t found any answer, my hipothesis:

- Bad Network card Driver (x)
- MySQL issue ? (x)
- Bad Harddisk (corrupt drivers or afd.sys itself, or anything associated to it)

Measures taken so far:

- Netlimiter v2.0 was making server crash (tcpip.sys BSOD) – was removed and v1.3 was installed, afd.sys started to crash, Netlimiter v1.3 was disabled;
- There were 2 NIC on this machine, i removed one (off board one);

Server lasts for a day , a day and 1/2 then get BSOD by afd.sys, i if the measures don’t give results next steps:

- Disable onboard NIC (x)
- Put an offboard NIC (x)
- Replace Harddisk ?
- Remove one memory stick
- Remove other memory stick

So far i’ve only found lame answers on search engines, i believe that this is not a NIC or driver issue, but a HD issue, since it happens in many different windows versions, i’m running windows 2003 but i’ve seen people with the same issue on windows 2000, xp, vista and so on, lots of people been complaining about this issue happening on DELL machines, however, for those people this issue started to happen after a year or two, wich could state bad harddisk.

By experiencing, i’ve learnt this issue isen’t related to “how many ports you open”, not to Netlimiter v1.3, it happened with 3 p2p opened (+500 ports open) and it also happened with no downloads running.

One thing that i’ve noticed is that BEFORE the crash happens svchost.exe gets stuck, some programs start to fail, like firefox, those programs get stuck and can’t get killed. The svchost.exe that get stuck is ran by “SYSTEM” i could’t find what were the switches for it before server crashing.

Another thing that people been randonsly talking about this issue is that it happens when a port keeps open idleing for too long, this causes a memory overflow wich leads to trash on memory that ends into a DRIVER_LEFT_LOCKED_PAGES_IN_PROCESS at BSOD.

That’s all by now.

- 080719@13:14 Update -

So almost exactly after 24 hours the server crashed again, same issue same aspects and nothing new, i have disabled the on-board NIC, now let’s wait another 24 hours to see what happens.

- 080719@18:55 Update -

Machine has crashed again, now i’m going to replace the harddisk to know if it’s a hdd problem.

- 080720@18:51 Update -

I’ve got a new hdd, installed windows 2003 from zero on it , updated everything, now running perfect dark, emule, flashget, utorrent, netlimiter v1.3, vshield enterprise, eve, vidalia and rdc, uptime so far is 53m.

-080721@23:27 Update -

It’s been a day and nothing happened, with the new hdd it seems to be stable now – still running emule, flashget (torrent+http downloads), smartftp, perfect dark, mirc, netlimiter, tor and some other stuff 24/7

-080728@01:01 Update (Final)-

Server has stopped crashing the issue was the hard disk afterall. afd.sys has nothing to do with the reason of the crash, maybe this file in specific got corrupt or some other file that uses it got corrupt and generated that issue, since the old disk was too old and got no spare sectors left this would have caused the problem, having a low level format might fix the issue, however, since we talking about a 5 year old disk, it wouldn’t last for too long, i replaced the disk and now it’s working just fine.