Why reboot SQL Server 2000 on a schedule? Well, I found a reason this week. Luckily I didn't get burned. I have a Win2K Advanced Server 2000 active/passive cluster, it's sole use is for SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. NOTHING ELSE. My sysadmin and I were checking out the passive node and decided to reboot it (it hadn't been rebooted in 4 months). OOOPPPS, it never came back up. It would start coming up, give an error about a service or driver that wouldn't start, checkdisk, blue screen, reboot and start all over again. We tried several different things. Nothing helped. I finally walked behind the racks and started pushing all the connectors to see if one was loose. Nothing all were seated properly. But amazing enough, the problem stopped and the passive node came up properly. Maybe one of the fiber optic connectors was just a hair loose. We'll never really know.

BUT...what if we hadn't rebooted the passive node? What if the active node had failed? There probably wouldn't have been a working node for it to failover to and we would of had a catastrophe (minor, but try explaining that to management).

Solution. We are going to reboot the passive node once a month. If it works ok, we will fail the active node over, reboot it, and then fail back to the primary node. This will assure us that both nodes work, failover works both ways AND clear out the tempdb database.

-SQLBill