Funny thing... I'm in the middle of reviewing the SysInternals video training series, and I'm currently in the middle of the crash dump analysis video. I've finished about an hour of it so far, and yesterday I noticed my client kept losing connectivity with the DB server in my lab. That's a fairly odd thing to happen, and I remembered something they said in the video, that Server 2003 is configured to reboot when it gets a blue screen. So I checked my dump dir, and sure enough, it had been blue screening and rebooting. So I fast forwarded to the part of the video where they talked about how to install the symbols and run the debugger to analyze the crash dump files. Within like 5mins of starting, I had the file analyzed and it told me that my RAID driver was probably the cause. So I went online and updated the driver. I just think it's funny that I start having this problem at the same time I'm given the tools to fix it.
Now, I'm not sure if that fixed the problem or not, because I'm still having some issues today. I have to wait until I get back there later to see if it's still dumping or if it's something else causing it. The point is however, that the basics of analyzing dumps aren't that hard, especially when they explain it to you in such detail.
So, while I haven't finished the final review yet, I'm going to go ahead and say that there isn't anybody in IT who wouldnt benefit from this series. It's simply fabulous. And the videos are only like $100/ea, so they're quite affordable.
I highly recommend that every one of you rush right out and get these videos. However, maybe you should wait for the final review to see how they shake out in the end. I'll post something here when I've got it done so you can go check it out.
If you're interested though, here's the direct link to the crash dump video.
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