PC Anywhere 11.5 causes stop error on Window Server 2003 with Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 9.x/8.x
Last Friday night, while I was getting ready for the three days weekend and enjoying the movie -Boat Trip. I remembered that I need to reboot a Window 2003 Server to apply the November patches. I didn’t give it much thought and believed this is going to be an easy 10 minutes work. So I connected through VPN, rebooted the server and back to my movie. After 15 minutes passed, I still couldn’t ping the server. I started to slap my head and concerned that my whole weekend is going to be ruined. I managed to gain access to the server through ILO and of course the BSOD was winking at me!
Here are the Stop error messages:
A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer...
KERNEL_APC_PENDING_DURING_EXIT
*** STOP: 0x00000020 (0x0x00000000, 0x0x0000fffa, 0x0x00000000, 0x0x00000001)
This is the last thing you need on a New Year weekend! From operation procedure standpoint, I don’t have to fix this myself, as I don’t deal with this on a normal daily basis. But I don’t want to disturb my colleagues on a New Year’s Eve weekend. After all, I was the person who triggered this. So I have no choice to pause my movie and start digging. After goggling for a while, I found the following links:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905539
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/pca.nsf/8d67bc594d5802c288256d2e006abd37/ed81a9e1b83b02f388256fbe0083c1ac?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam
I now remembered and realized that this is caused by PC Anywhere 11.5 installed on the server which has Symantec Antivirus 9 installed. The symevent driver installed by PC Anywhere doesn’t compatible with the driver for Symantec Antivirus 9x/8x. I managed to start the server in safe mode with networking which it’s not as easy as it sounds, you have to keep press F8 to get to the Advanced Option Menu and this is sometimes tricky especially that I was on the ILO connection and my mind was still in the movie. Once I log on , I download and updated the symevent driver from the above link and rebooted the machine. The server was finally back on line after about 2 hours.
Lesson learned – Don’t ever try to reboot a server on a Friday night before holiday unless you absolutely have to do so! You just don’t know what’s waiting for you!