[TriLUG] Odd problem with RH8.0 box

Jon Carnes jonc at nc.rr.com
Wed Jan 28 22:01:33 EST 2004


I second Jason's theory. I've run into that exact problem before with
boxes having disk problems.

When booting, does the fsck show any bad sectors or problems that it
can't fix?

Jon

On Wed, 2004-01-28 at 21:51, Jason Tower wrote:
> it sounds like a problem with either the hard drive or the disk 
> controller.  anything that accesses the disk is hanging.  unlike 
> logins, mail, ssh, etc, routing and iptables don't generally require 
> disk access once they're loaded into memory so they aren't failing.
> 
> of course, that's just my opinion, i could be wrong.
> 
> jason
> 
> On Wednesday 28 January 2004 21:38, Peter Long wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I have been experiencing an intermittent problem with my trusty Linux
> > box. Unfortunately I can't figure out the cause. The machine is
> > running RedHat 8.0 and is a PII 350 with 384MB of RAM. It also has
> > more then enough RAM. The box serves as my gateway to the Internet.
> > It has two NICs and I am running IP Tables on it. I also use it as my
> > mail server.
> >
> > The symptoms of the problem are that every now and then it seems to
> > "lock up". By that I mean that I cannot login at the console, neither
> > via X or tty. The funny thing is that it still works fine as a
> > router. My internal machines can still send traffic through it after
> > it has locked up. At first I thought it was a problem with PAM since
> > it locked up when I tried to login. Incidently IMAP from remote
> > machines would also stop working as well as new SSH connections.
> > Named also stops responding. I tried testing my theory that it was a
> > PAM problem by leaving one tty console logged in after rebooting the
> > system. However when the problem re-occurred I discovered that I
> > could not do an 'ps' at the bash prompt. So it seems that you cannot
> > launch new processes either.
> >
> > There are no funny errors in the logs to indicate what the problem
> > could be. Actually it seems to stop writing to the log entirely. I
> > usually get an entry in the 'messages' log every 30 minutes from
> > iptables for BOOTP traffic that is dropped. These stop occurring.
> >
> > It does not seem to be a disk space or ram problem. I have gig free
> > and 230MB of the 384MB is unused.
> >
> > Any clues or tips would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > --
> > Peter Long




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