Hi,

I've a machine that every so often locks up in an odd way. It's on the 
other side of the atlantic so I can't nip over and run top on it. 
Symptoms are:

- ssh (OpenSSH) connections hang after you enter the password, 
apparantly indefinitely (30 mins and counting)
- SMTP (sendmail) works fine until you send the '.' after the DATA 
command, and then it hangs as per SMTP. It is possible to open many 
connections to the SMTP server
- IMAP (WU) connections hang
- Apache and mod_php for simple pages work. I can even run the PHP page 
that executes the search indexer and that runs successfully. However the 
phpBB install hangs on page access
- ping works with 100% reliability
- When rebooted, the machines come up fine wth no obviously wrong 
messages in the logs

The machine is a dual processor PII, running kernel 2.6.5-SMP on Fedora 
Core 1.

Any ideas what would go wrong to cause these sorts of symptoms? I'm 
anxious to try and avoid this repeating again.

Thanks,

Luke

Luke Ross <lukeross@sys3175.co.uk> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I've a machine that every so often locks up in an odd way. It's on the
> other side of the atlantic so I can't nip over and run top on
> it. Symptoms are:
> 
> - ssh (OpenSSH) connections hang after you enter the password,
> apparantly indefinitely (30 mins and counting)
> - SMTP (sendmail) works fine until you send the '.' after the DATA
> command, and then it hangs as per SMTP. It is possible to open many
> connections to the SMTP server
> - IMAP (WU) connections hang
> - Apache and mod_php for simple pages work. I can even run the PHP
> page that executes the search indexer and that runs
> successfully. However the phpBB install hangs on page access
> - ping works with 100% reliability
> - When rebooted, the machines come up fine wth no obviously wrong
> messages in the logs
> 
> The machine is a dual processor PII, running kernel 2.6.5-SMP on
> Fedora Core 1.
> 
> Any ideas what would go wrong to cause these sorts of symptoms? I'm
> anxious to try and avoid this repeating again.

This looks like a problem with the file systems.
I bet the processes get blocked in D state.
If it's not a hardware problem, rebooting with a good fsck session should help.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not
want merely because you think it would be good for him. -- Robert Heinlein

Hi,

Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> 
> This looks like a problem with the file systems.
> I bet the processes get blocked in D state.
> If it's not a hardware problem, rebooting with a good fsck session should help.

Hmm would this depends on which files were being accessed? I was 
slightly surprised that it was able to successfully reindex half a dozen 
directories via the web interface when not much else would respond.

Cheers,

Luke