rpc server unavailable

fobbed off

[dave_k]

Hi
I have my ie6 homepage default to the index page of my site and pretty well every time I log on, I get this:
"rpc server unavailable"
When I refresh it seems ok, but it's still intermittent and completely unacceptable as I am logging hundreds of page errors in the stats for other pages as well. I've tried reloading the entire site and disabling/re enabling scripts. ( No purist comments about it being a win2k server, please.) and all the other obvious checks
I'll probably end up moving but I've got a load of clients' sites hosted there.

Here's the reply from the hosting provider

"Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you for your email.
The problems which you have reported with RPC server errors can occur with hosting in a shared server environment. The scripting on a virtual server is shared between all of the users on that server, each server runs the users script in protected memory space. This means that whilst the server has a finite total amount of power to devote to running a users script, if one crashes it should not disrupt the others. However if the service that manages the protected space fails it becomes unable to reach the RPC (remote procedure call) server. We could stop this effect by dropping all domains into unprotected memory, however this would cause all scripts to fail if one went down. If the service levels achieved in this environment do not fulfil your needs then you may wish to consider a dedicated server solution, as this will allow you complete control and greater flexibility in your......yawn, yawn, yawn."

This is very interesting, but hasn't in any way solved my problems. It seems they've said " we know we told you that you would be able to have cgi scripts, but we can't be held responsible if they don't work. If you pay us £100 a month more then they might well work"

Anyone had this problem? Any advice or links to other articles on this before I get back to them would be great. I would like to publish my url and also the host's name, so I can get some feedback from some of you and find out if you get errors as well. I guess that would be seen as advertising the site though, and the hosts are otherwise very good ( 24 hour phone support inc.).and as I'm a new user of these forums I'll wait for advice on this as well.
cheers

[sugarkane]

It certainly seems like your hosts have made a policy decision to only allow scripts to run in protected memory, and I doubt that they'd change their minds as it's a good idea in principle.

There's been an exploit reported that can crash the RPC server - it might be worth seeing if your hosts have implemented Microsoft's fix [support.microsoft.com] which may at least reduce the amount of times the problem occurs.

> I would like to publish my url and also the host's name

Thanks for checking first :)
We prefer though to keep discussion to a general nature rather than naming specific hosts or sites, as this is likely to be helpful to more forum members. If your site is the one listed in your profile, then I connected without a problem.

[Woz]

Dave, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I assume the file listed in your profile is the site in question.

I am not very knowledgable when it comes to server problems but at least I can report that I just got exactly the same results as you are reporting on ie5.5. It does seem streange though that the problem repeats on first view of your site. This would seem to suggest a bug rather then and overloaded common shared server. However, over to the server experts now...

Onya
Woz