11 Jan 2002 Centove   » (Journeyer)

One of the big drawbacks to Linux is that its so damm reliable :) Let me clairfy this...

We have a machine that everyone at work basically forgot about, for about a year. It was/is a simple web hosting machine that really hasn't been paid attention to. I get a request to cancel one of the websites we host. I rummage around on the network for a bit trying to locate said site. It comes up as being on machine <x>. Machine <x>? What is that? More to the point _Where_ is that. Connect, it wants a password. hmm.. Now what was the password for this box... Try all the ones I can remember, none of them work. Ok.. off to the console to hack into the box and change the password so that we can once again get into the machine. Login cancel the site and go about my other business. (btw this is kernel 2.0.33 which shows how long its been chugging away in the rack basically being ignored) Wind up rebooting the machine, check it, yep all the stuff is running as it should.

20 minutes later Evolution is thrashing at the drive something fierce.. hmm.. appears that sendmail on this machine had quit around nov of 2000 and no-one noticed it. And now that it was running it was happily dumping a years worth of mail out. (over 7K of messages in the queue when I discovered this) Yikes.

Kinda like the nntp server we had that quit responding one day and no-one remembered where that one was either.

There is another machine (A Dual 350 PII box) that has been running so long the uptime wrapped. Funny thing about that is when it was booted however long ago that was it only booted one processor for some reason, so that one has been humping along with one processor basically shut off for well over a year. (And its a mail server so it is _not_ just idling in the corner)

Today's lesson? Log into your boxes from time to time just to see if they are doing thier thing cause you _will_ forget about one. If you think thats impossible, imagine close to 100 servers and 36 routers. You will forget about one that don't give you any problems...

On the home front the home workstation still locks up for no apparent reason though the thinking is now that something in the ide subsystem is flakey. And it appears to be related to the external UDMA66 card I have.. Letting kernel/bios set things as they see fit, heavy disk access == locked machine. Switched the drives on the external card to UDMA2 and things are a bit better. However 2.4.17 appears to be a keeper on the Alpha, 14 days uptime and no mysterious lockups yet over there. So its beaten its previous 2.4.xx record of 3 days by a long shot. On the intel side of the house however we are at a record of seven days.

2.2.xxx just keeps chugging along on the other box so looks like marcello still has some issues to sort before 2.4.xxx will be truely stable.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!