🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MWS3SEHMH@linac.fnal.gov> matt@severian.chi.il.us (Matt Crawford) writes:
>Gregory Gulik:
>> I just got off the phone with Russell.  He says he will try
>> to make the trip down to Clout tonight (from Naperville) to fix it.
>
>I guess he didn't, eh?  Youse guys need an on-campus cloutster again,
>like yez useta have.

It was snowing rather badly at the time.  I made it down the next
afternoon.

>This isn't a crash, per se.  Is it some known cause, like a full disk
>or like that-there?

This isn't related to disk space.  In fact none of the clout "outages" for
quite some time have had anything to do with disk space, regardless of
misleading console messages.

Here's a quick run down on the causes for a few of the recent events
that lead to the need for local reboot:

The most recent problem was with NIS.  The ypserv process got killed, and
something wanted to check a NIS map, this will bring a Sun to it's knees.

Before that we had a remote reboot hang due to a memory error. This has
happened about 3 times in the past few months.  We haven't traced the
cause of our little memory parity error, but I suspect it might have
something to do with line glitches, cosmic rays, heat, or malignant beings
from the spirit world.

We have altered the way clout handles incoming SMTP traffic, and
sometimes heavy incoming traffic has overloaded the machine, on at least
one ocasion this put the machine into an insane state, the console errors
said something about being out of i-nodes however the problem was entirely
a result of filled memory and swap space.

Now, during this time clout has had problems with spool space, including
two instances of the mailbombing of a local client site.  NOT ONCE has
this required a physical reboot of clout, and at least three times that I
remember it hasn't even had any effect on the function of the clout
machine.

In each case one or more members of the admin team have become aware of
the problem early enough to head off any trouble.  And in the instance of
the mail bombing when the client noticed that his filsystem had filled
he contacted us and warned us well before things became critical on
clout.
--
Russell Rezaian			|  rrezaian@austral.chi.il.us