Seishun's questions

All servers I am writing about below are running Windows 2003 R2. We have a 2003 native domain with two sites (connected by VPN) and two DCs (one DC in each site).

It started a few hours ago - my database server stopped responding gradually, and I already couldn't log in by RDP at the time I discovered this. Event Viewer and Computer Management consoles didn't connect to it, producing popups with RPC 1721 & 1723 errors.
All the database-related services stopped working, and Database Mail errors weren't mailed out.
However, I could access file shares on this server and ping worked.

Then, other RDP users started complaining about the new problem: as they logged in, after the 'loading personal settings' message, the desktop just showed up blank - no icons, no Start menu and buttons.
All the existing connections worked - however, if you logged out, you also got blank screen after logging back in.
As I experimented, I found out that it only applied to domain logins - however, there was no difference between trying to login as a regular user or an administrator. You also got blank screen when trying to login with domain administrator on physical console! (well, I only tried it on an VMware virtual machine, since physical servers are very far away)
I also couldn't log out or reset my own stuck sessions using Terminal Services Management console (a message popped up, saying that I couldn't reset this session because of the error with the connected device). However, local administrator login worked both on the console and in RDP session.

By that time I got tired of trying to access Computer Management or trying to reboot the DB server with shutdown.exe, and asked the datacenter tech support to reboot the server.
As soon as Windows loaded, I could log in not only to the DB server, but to all other servers without any problems. Other users' problems disappeared as well.

A fortunate outcome... But still, I don't know what happened, at all!
All servers have NOD32 antivirus running, though active protection is disabled on DB server and only regular scans are employed (as for now, no viruses were found). The network as it is was running for over 6 months, and individual servers are in use for over 2 years, without major problems. AD works fine, all related diagnostics pass without warning.

Any thoughts?

We have a relatively small network, all PSs in one subnet. One PC with two NICs and pfSense installed works as a firewall/router. There is an OpenVPN tunnel to a remote location, created as a site-to-site connection to another pfSense box there.

I have an assignment to capture, store and show (via a web interface) information on traffic generated (both incoming and outcoming) by each host on our subnet and present it in several views:

• megabytes per calendar hours / days / months / years (that is, not just "one month back", but "in Dec 2010" and so on);
• megabytes per destination: VPN to remote location / other destinations / Google Apps servers.

I tried the software packages in pfSense that offer traffic montoring - but it seems they don't store the information fixed by months, instead showing the amounts of traffic generated in periods (days/months/etc) calculated from the present moment.

I'm also interested in understanding what would be the best way for me to break up traffic by hosts and destinations.

I'm open to all suggestions, even if they mean that I will have to understand something new to me.

I have two ESXi servers, both updated with the latest patches through the Host Update Utility. One of the ESXi servers is a new install, other was around for about 8 months without any problems arising. All VMs are ESXi native, created on the old server (I have serveral Windows 2003 and Arch Linux VMs). After installing ESXi on the new server and updating both servers, I tried moving VMs from the old one. However, the job fails every time with the status:

FAILED: The operation is not supported on the object.

However, I am still able to convert ESXi VM to the VMware Server VM (it's installed on my own workstation). I have necessary sysprep files in the Converter directory, both hypervisors and the Converter are the latest versions available... What's wrong? What should I do to be able to move VMs between ESXi servers?

UPD: Converter also worked in the past (about 4 months ago), while I templorarily installed ESXi on a whitebox to test whether conversion works at all.