Server keeps crashing

[Viper.]

Our Office server has crashed 2 days in a row around the same time (10pm-11pm) with this message:



Any ideas what's causing this? I looked in the logs but nothing really stood out.

[Edge100x]

The most common cause of errors like that is a plugin. Are you running plugins, and have you tried temporarily disabling them to see if the error stops occurring?

If it's not a plugin, it could be that someone is using an exploit on you. There are several out there that Valve hasn't patched yet.

[Viper.]

These are our plugins..

20:57:41 Listing 4 plugins:
[01] SourceMod (1.2.2) by AlliedModders LLC
[02] Mani Admin Plugin (1.2BetaS SMM) by Mani
[03] CS:S Tools (1.2.2) by AlliedModders LLC
[04] SDK Tools (1.2.2) by AlliedModders LLC

People used to crash our server before by spamming 'timeleft' or something and it would crash the server but it always restarted itself.

I'll try to investigate more and find the cause. It may be a plugin like you say though.

[Edge100x]

If temporarily disabling plugins does address it, the most likely culprits are the old SM version (I'd recommend upgrading this to 1.2.4) and Mani mod (you should remove that, if possible).

[Viper.]

Well the crashes seem to have stopped. Is there any way for the server to automatically reboot if crashes do occur in future? Rather than me doing it remotely everytime.

[Edge100x]

If you are running the server through FireDaemon, it has an option for dialog monitoring that might apply here: http://www.firedaemon.com/manual/index.html?DialogsTab

Here at NFO, we have a script that checks each server for responsiveness every 5 minutes and auto-restarts them remotely, which also would take care of it for you but would be much more complicated to set up.

You should also make sure that you have the various error reporting dialogs turned off in Windows, through the Control Panel->System->Advanced->Error Reporting box.

[DontWannaName]

Starting your server with -nocrashdialog will make the error message go away if that helps...

[Edge100x]

Most of the time, -nocrashdialog doesn't do much for me, but it's certainly worth a try

[DontWannaName]

Maybe its one of those windows only command line options, I have never seen an error box on any of my servers.

[Edge100x]

We run mostly Windows servers and I've definitely seen errors pop up even when that option is used (such as in response to a couple of CS:S exploits that are currently making the rounds). But, it's very likely that it does prevent many of the more common types of errors, so it's good to have on there.

[DontWannaName]

Maybe they fixed it in OB but not CSS.

[Edge100x]

That's definitely a possibility.