We were having an occasional hang issue with a Dell Server running Windows Storage Server. We monitored the processes on the server. We disabled as many services as possible. We kept trying to narrow down the issue. Nothing helped.

Eventually, our web searches pointed to a feature on these Dell machines with the name “TCP Offload Engine” (TOE). In the driver settings we disabled the TOE feature. Problem persisted. More research. Some people indicated that disabling the settings in the driver was not enough. A licensing key needed to be removed from the mother board. Suddenly, this has become hardware maintenance. This is where the power of a site like Flickr becomes apparent. After some additional web searching, we came across a couple of links showing exactly what needed to be done, step-by-step, with photos on Flickr. What sounded scary at first became simple as we followed the instructions on a development server.

FYI – this did not solve our problems. We ended up re-writing the section of code accessing the storage server and the problem went away. Sigh…