Server Overheating?

[acole1]

At work we have an old P3 1Ghz running our backup server (it just backs up data from the other servers and writes to a tape once a day) and it keeps overheating somewhat randomly and restarting every once and a while.

The problem was at it's climax a couple months back when it would restart almost every day causing problems with our backups and therefore crashing our other, more important servers. I took the server out of the tower it is in and opened it up to check out the hardware and check for viruses and Spyware that might be making it crash and it is all clean. The fan in the heatsink rattles a little because it?s old but other than that there is nothing wrong with the machine that I could find. All the fans were working and while I had it out for monitoring it didn't overheat once or restart. Finally I put it back and it was fine for a while then started overheating every couple of days until the server case was modified (the fan at the top was sucking in air from the top out.. not from the bottom up, so the top slits were covered forcing it to draw from bottom up) and this helped lower the frequency of the overheats. Then this past weekend it restarted, and it did again today! It has not restarted in a couple of months on its own, and then all of a sudden it is happening all over again. Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this?!

 

[tweekah]

System protection on the CPU. The system will shutdown @ a certain temperature to protect the processor/hardware from serious damage. Sometimes if the system notices that a cpu fan stops spinning it will shutdown as well.

Get some canned air and spray it out. If you know how to remove the cpu heatsink/fan do so and clean it out. Make sure you reapply thermal compound. Good luck.

Edit: you may want to replace that rattling fan, it may be off-balanced and no longer is performing at par.

 

[acole1]

i set up motherboard monitor on it and i have it email (and then txt msg me) when it overheats and then a batch file that run when it restarts (and emails and txt msgs me). the overheat message i set at 100f... low for a P3 to shutdown but a few F above normal operating. i assume the overheat comes from the bad heatsink/fan (which is clean) but the restart doesnt seem to have any connection to the cpu temp.
in theory it should hit the 100f mark +, text me, then shut down, restart, and txt me again... but i dont even get an overheat when before it restarts. is there any way to tell if it "shuts down" or if it just turns off and restarts? i read that the high operating temp for a P3 is 180F-190F? even if MBM isnt accurate 100F shouldent even be close to making it overheat.

*edit*
also switched out the PSU