Month: August 2006

I suck as a system administrator.

There have been some problems with my server recently. It has been running out of swap three or four times resulting in random processes being killed. Two times i had to reboot it, because i was not able to log in anymore, first time the named process was killed, second time the ssh process was killed.
Now i have added some kind of poor mans watchdog script to cron.

/etc/rc.d/sshd status > /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
/etc/rc.d/sshd restart
fi

The cause of the problem is still unknown, the log only says that perl processes are stealing my memory, so suspects are SpamAssassin or a CGI.
I restored a backup from before the problem started (wow, my backups seem to actually work..) and started to experiment with RLimitMem.
Since i am going on holiday in September (two weeks without internet access), i hope the problems are solved now.
P.S. turbo23 pointed me to the work by Chris Jones for SoC06, which would have solved a lot of the problems. So i am looking forward to getting jail resource limits into the mainline.