Re: [gentoo-server] interesting occurence

[Jonathan S. Romero]

Can you check your syslogs to check for reboots?

If you get a reboot without the corresponding service shutdown messages, 
then you might have had some hard shutdowns.

-Jonathan S. Romero

Ben Munat wrote:

> Unfortunately, this is my only server -- handling several live sites
> and email -- and I don't have the funds to rent another server while I
> figure out what's up with this. I will, however, talk to the hosting
> company... not sure what they could do but...
>
> The machine -- a celeron 1.8 gHz, I believe -- had a basic gentoo
> system on it when we rented it, and then I emerged all the apps I
> wanted. So, I didn't set up the partitions or the filesystems. Here's
> the fstab:
>
> /dev/hda1     /boot     ext2            noauto,noatime          1 1
> /dev/hda3     /         reiserfs        noatime                 0 0
> /dev/hda2     none      swap            sw                      0 0
>
> Haven't seen any other filesystem glitches, but it was inaccessible
> for a bit last week. (That could have been the whole hosting company
> though.) Maybe there was a hard crash around then.
>
> Well, I dunno... I appreciate your advice.  Was hoping, however, that
> someone one the list had actually heard of this sort of thing
> occuring. I'll talk to the hosting company... maybe they'll just move
> me to another machine to be safe.
>
> Ben
>
>
> Jonathan S. Romero wrote:
>
>> That's fairly high in the scary meter.  I would be surprised if the
>> problem lies with qmail.
>> I would reccomend taking the system down for testing, including long
>> cpu tests, and memory stability tests, from a liveCD.
>>
>> What filesystem were you using again? Any RAID configuration, special
>> processor settings?  It really looks like the filesystem got messed
>> up somehow.
>>
>> -Jonathan S. Romero
>>
>> Ben Munat wrote:
>>
>>> Not sure what you mean "maildir style names"... the names of the
>>> files were random bits of (I believe) a single email. So, the file
>>> listing looked something like this:
>>>
>>> root@foo>ls
>>> somerealfile.txt
>>> myrealpackage.tgz
>>> been meaning to call and talk to him but I
>>> anotherrealfile.jpg
>>> the other day. So, Bob was saying that I could probably get a
>>> anotherfile
>>> etc.
>>>
>>> This isn't an actual listing... I deleted the files already. They
>>> were empty files and their names were seemingly random bits of text.
>>> However, I recognized pieces of that text to have come from an email
>>> that my Aunt sent me a while back.
>>>
>>> Very strange.
>>>
>>> Ben
>>>
>>>
>>> Jonathan S. Romero wrote:
>>>
>>>> Did the files have maildir style names?
>>>>
>>>> -Jonathan
>>>>
>>>> Ben Munat wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Here's a weird occurence that has me stumped. Logged into my
>>>>> gentoo server and did an "ls" in root's home directory. Mixed in
>>>>> with all the files I expected in there were a number of empty text
>>>>> files... and here's the strange part: the names of the files were
>>>>> random snippets from an email that I received a while back!
>>>>>
>>>>> Now, if I remember correctly, that email was actually routed to
>>>>> root, so I guess at least the email that got sliced up into file
>>>>> names did come from root's maildir... it didn't come from
>>>>> somewhere else on the system. But I had thrown that email away a
>>>>> long time ago... though, I haven't done an "ls" in root's home dir
>>>>> in a while, so I'm not sure how long the files have been there.
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, I'm running qmail... anyone have any ideas how text from a
>>>>> mail file gets scattered around as names of files?
>>>>>
>>>>> Ben
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>