At work we where having troubles with HP Proliant DL380 G5 servers: after 2 days or so the server – both Windows server 2003 and 2008 – is only reachable at the network shares. No login possible, neither at the console or trough rdp.

It started with a Windows Server 2003 and I found a registry entry that made it possible to login and then reboot the server. The registry modification is described at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815266

Lately a Windows Server 2008 started having the same network issues. Updating the NIC and RAID controller drivers didn’t solve the issues, but changed the behaviour – made the server faster unreachable.

That made me download the latest firmware DVD, run it in auto mode. And low and behold the server stays reachable and does its job!

Other server have jet to be updated, but that’s a matter of time.

So keep your firmware up to date!