System hound client hangs windows 98 pc (sh service not responding)

[melwyn]

Hi all,

Few of our pc's frequently hang. On pressing ctrl+alt+del  we have seen that sh service not responding.

I think this happens when the client pc is connecting to the system hound server.

Any help on this is appreciated.

regards

melwyn

[Nish]

whats the spec of these machines? If they're low spec, it could be that the machine might be struggling with a network connection, especially if users are connected to network resources at the same time

You should bear in mind that SH only scans the system  by default once per day, and the logfile it generates is usually not very large (between 10-30k on average). Apart from this, it also contacts the server once per hour to download any new configurations and to upload any logfiles. So this amount of very light traffic shouldn't cause any network jams.

You need to look at how often you've set the hardware and software scans to run. If you've changed this from the default intervals of once per day, to shorter intervals, you need to decide whether this is really necessary. You may want to set longer intervals. You could also change the systemhound Data Upload intervals to once per day, instead of once per hour. All this will help in reducing the impact on the machine. But you should also check your network for other bottlenecks that put an undue strain on your Win 9x machines.

[Dee]

Tip:

To identify the cause, try running the systemhound utility shrefresh.exe ( found on the central server within systemhound\utils ).

By running shrefresh.exe from within a dos prompt on the client machine you should be able to identify where the delay is occuring from the on-screen output.

systemhound has been designed to be as lightweight and unobtrusive as possible and feedback is always welcome

[DavidG]

I have this problem on about half of our Win98 PCs. They are mostly Dell PII 400-500s with 128Mb RAM. It happens a little while (one, maybe two minutes) after the client installation (via login script). ALT+CTRL+DEL shows SHSERVICE not responding. The affected PCs freeze very badly and need to be rebooted. They keep on freezing after the client is installed until I uninstall systemhound.

Any ideas?

[Nish]

DavidG, can you do the following:

stop the collector service on the server

re-install the client on two of these client machines by using the systemhound.exe or calling the login script, etc, then send hwinfo.log and upload.dat from systemhound\logs on both machines (not the server) to support@systemhound.com with the URL to this thread.

restart the collector service

comparing the files from both will help us determine if its the same issue causing the freeze

[DavidG]

okay. I can do that tomorrow. When you say reinstall on two machines, you mean on one that works and one that doesn't, right?

[Nish]

no, on two where it hangs.

[TonyS]

I have also found this to be a significant problem on Win98 machines; no problems yet on Win2K + machines.   The SHService hangs a couple of minutes after booting, and completely paralyses the pc, requiring a full reboot.   On some machines, the problem persists, requiring a re-install, or even uninstalling.

- Tony

[Nish]

TonyS, can you do as I've outlined in my reply to DavidG above and send the files in to us? Otherwise, its difficult to get to the bottom of this.

[DavidG]

Okay. I have done as asked and am awaiting some feedback. The machines did not crash while the collector service was stopped on the Systemhound server.

[Tak]

Had there been any updates to this thread?  We are also experiencing similar problems (Win98 machines hanging or running very slow until we reboot the computers) at our department.

Thanks

[Nish]

please contact support@systemhound.com on this issue

[Tak]

I have contacted support through the support site about 3 days ago but I got no response.  I'll try the direct e-mail.