[plug] How to diagnose a crashing Linux server?

[Richard Mortimer]

Hi Craig, Ben, et al,

The odd thing about my lastlog being 18Mb in size is that there are three
valid users on the system, two of whom rarely log on, and the machine was
set up a couple of months ago ~feb/mar.

I followed the other thread on this topic, and followed a similar tact,
which recreated the lastlog as a 143kb file.

>setterm -blank 0

Thanks - however my screen keeps turning off, I've turned 'off' energy
saving in both the screen itself, and RH(Gnome) -> Preferences ->
Screensaver | Advanced and also applied the CLI parameters as supplied
above. Trying the 'failsafe' login mode to see if that stops the screen turn
off.

>Does it reply to ICMP?

Will a 'ping' suffice? I haven't tried this, but can next time it fails.

>I have seen something like this once. A real pain it was, too.

Yes, intermitant problems are always the worst ... :(

>Can you read that file w/o problems

Yes, the file is output from a web form, and is generally <40kb.

One thing I've noticed, however is the memory usage is up reasonably high,
at 3PM yesterday, following a reboot at around 9am, there was 293Mb of 1.5Gb
of physical memory in use, with none of the 1.9Gb swap file being used.
Today at 9.30AM there was 1.4Gb of memory in use, with no swap file being
used. Currently (3PM today) there is still 1.4Gb of memory in use, the top
usage programs are nautilus (~14Mb), python (~15Mb), gnome-settings-daemon
(~12.2Mb), gnome-panel (~10Mb), gnome-system-monitor (~8.5Mb) and httpd
(~8Mb) ... the total of these seems to be nowhere near the 1.4Gb being
reported used. This info was collected via System Monitor. 'free' seems to
indicate roughly the same figures.

CPU usage seems to have stayed pretty stable at around 1-2%.

Does this give any more clues??

Thanks

Richard


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Jensz" <jensz at wn.com.au>
To: <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2003 3:53 PM
Subject: Re: [plug] How to diagnose a crashing Linux server?


> Craig Ringer wrote:
>
> > Interesting. Mine is 18k but this server has only been around for
> > ~9months. Does the "lastlog" command still like the file?
> >
> The machine with the oldest install here at work has a lastlog file of
> almost 19Mb in size.  Install was about 18 months ago and the lastlog
> command works fine.
>
> / Ben