This problem first occurred on our main company server some months ago and was first noticed when the companyweb intranet site stopped being displayed. Upon logging on to the server desktop and opening the server management console, any pages that were displayed by IIS (such as the backup section) just displayed a www error ("Page cannot be displayed") as if IIS was not running at all. This occurs if you try to access the web server from the WAN, LAN and Localhost. However, upon checking IIS everything seemed to be fine, the default website was 'running' and we could find nothing to suggest a problem anywhere. After trying many things, such as iisreset or stopping and starting services, we eventually restarted the server and the problem was temporarily fixed.
This problem, with IIS stopping displaying pages, occurred at regular intervals for the next 4 months occurring every 8 days and 2 hours. Each time there was no obvious signs of anything wrong with the server, no errors were recorded in the event log, the IIS console showed no problems, everything else worked fine (including exchange, file sharing, vpns etc) but any functions reliant on IIS would simply stop. This meant that the remote web workspace, intranet, hosted web pages and some server console pages would stop working completely.
Over those 4 months we tried everything we could think of and even got a Microsoft MVP for SBS to take a look for us. No one could find anything wrong at all and even the MVP was stumped. Apart from the obvious problem of web pages not displaying there were NO outward signs of there being any problems with setup or configuration. Each time it occurred we tried new things but the only resolution seemed to be to restart the server.
We posted on the MS managed newsgroups and were told to try re-installing IIS. On SBS this is difficult because of the tight integration with Exchange etc so eventually we formatted the server and started from scratch; which so far has completely fixed the problem even though we are using the same software/drivers etc. The problem is we have now seen the issue re-occur on one of our clients servers (which we set up) and another server (which we inherited from another IT support company). These servers have slightly dissimilar hardware, use different AV software, different backup and different UPS software and I have found no one thing linking them all.
Each of the servers with this problem exhibits almost exactly the same 8 day interval. After this time anything hosted by IIS does not work so we have taken to restarting these servers every 7 days as a temporary work-around. I have tried literally everything I can think of but because there are no event log errors or IIS errors theres very little to go on. I have seen others with this issue on this and other forums but so far no resolution has been found and the only fix appears to be a complete format and re-install.
Additional Info: I have only seen this occur on Windows SBS 2003; both R1 and R2. All the machines are HP Proliant Servers with the latest drivers and updates. All the servers are using SP2, are of a minimum 2Gig RAM and use either P4 3.0GHz CPU's or Xeon 1.86 CPU's. All hardware is under 1 year old.
