Question:
What does it mean if ExtremeZ-IP.exe is listed as the faulting process in a kernel dump (BSOD)?
Answer:
Crashes in Microsoft Windows fall into two broad categories:
1. Application crashes.
When a single application crashes, that application's process terminates, but other applications and services continue to run. An application crash is usually due to a bug where the application makes an illegal request: for example, dividing a number by 0 or accessing a non-existent area of memory. Applications and services are said to reside in "user-mode" to distinguish them from code that is run in "kernel-mode", and these crashes are sometimes referred to as "user-mode crashes". If Acronis Files Connect crashes, it will automatically generate a crash dump file in its application directory.
2. Kernel crashes.
When an error occurs within the Windows kernel, the operating system cannot recover. It displays the "blue screen of death" and halts all applications and services, requiring a reboot. Kernel crashes cannot directly be caused by errors in user-mode applications or services, but come from bugs in the kernel itself (operating system drivers or third-party drivers) or hardware errors (most often in RAM). A kernel crash is often the last event in a series of requests that begin with a request from a user-mode application or service. For example, when a Macintosh client tries to rename a file in the Finder, Acronis Files Connect will make a request to the filesystem to perform the rename operation. The request to rename comes from a user-mode service (Acronis Files Connect), but the actual rename operation occurs within the kernel. If an error occurs during the processing of the rename operation, a blue screen may result. But while the Acronis Files Connect service may have issued the initial rename request, a blue screen always means that the bug lies in the kernel or in hardware, not in the user-mode Acronis Files Connect process.
If a server has a series of successive kernel crashes that all list Acronis Files Connect as the user-mode process running at the time of the crash, the most likely problem is with a third-party filesystem driver, such as replication or antivirus. A bug in a filesystem driver will be exposed most often by user-mode applications and services that issue a large number of a file system requests, and Acronis Files Connect, as a file server, makes a large number of such requests.