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.

surprise gift

Today the /usr partion on my server reached 100% again. While trying to find some stuff to delete i suddently noticed that all partions counted up to only 10G although the harddisk had 30G, so there were 20G of unused space on the harddisk *yay*.

Linux multicast routing..

…sucks. i currently have to implement a multicast router that also runs a multicast application. Unfortunatetly it has to run on Linux.
It appears as if Linux 2.6 despite running mrouted or pimd on the system routes its own multicast packets according to the normal kernel routing table to the default route.
So it looks like we have to find an application layer solution *argh*.

Cleaning up my Computer junkyard

If anyone is interested, i need to get rid of several old computers:
System 1 Miditower with (excerpts from dmesg):
total memory = 127 MB
cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) (586-class), 199.92 MHz, id 0x52c
cpu0: features 1bf
ex0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0: 3Com 3c905-TX 10/100 Ethernet (rev. 0x0)
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0:
wd0: 14664 MB, 29795 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 30033360 sectors
System 2:
CPU: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor (400.91-MHz 586-class CPU)
Origin = “AuthenticAMD” Id = 0x58c Stepping = 12
Features=0x8021bf
AMD Features=0x80000800
real memory = 134201344 (127 MB)
rl0: port 0xb000-0xb0ff mem 0xd9800000-0xd98000ff ir
q 12 at device 13.0 on pci0
ad0: 8063MB [16383/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33

Hot summer

Yesterday evening in Soccer Worldcup Sweden played against England and T&T played against Paraguay. Sweden vs. England was quite interesting as the Swedes were finally able to score again.
In FreeBSD land yesterday evening was also interesting, as it was the last day to stand up as a candidate for the upcoming Core team election. Unfortunately unlike two years ago, this time several members of the old team decided not to run again, so there are now realistic chances for at least 5 new faces.
But what surprised me, although there are now more committers than two years ago, when 23 candidates tried to get a seat, this time on the last day only 13 committers had declared their intentions to step into the big shoes of the current team.
While watching the the first half of the soccer match, i frequently checked with w(1) on the election server if someone runs the “stand up” command.
Unfortunately it seems like everyone except David was watching the soccer match. 14 candidates are still not enough because if only few candidates decide to withdraw their statements (which happend in the past), we could stop this voting game before it starts. I am hoping that we will get a good core team supported by the majority of developers and not a core team “because we found nobody else for the job”.
During the second half i wrote a quick statement and after the match i fired “stand up” myself. Although i have been a committer for four years and made more than 2000 commits to the ports tree, i guess most src and doc committers have no idea who i am.
Next time i should try to get a src/doc bit first before getting into the heat…

FIFA worldcup in ASCII

is very addicting.
Especially while learning for boring exams.
I wonder who translates the subtitles. Very funny haha.
“Drei minutes still. Counter over ancestor”
“Jetzt comes Trezeguet! Zidane must of the place, perhaps the all-last mark!”
“Die fear is located to the Frenchmen in the face written! still 2 minutes”
“Freistoss of sixteen-strain!!”
“Ahn shoots completly bad beside the housing”

telnet diego.ascii-wm.net 2006

Scanner update

Today i decided, that i will most likely never use my old SCSI Scanner again, because my Desktop machines don’t have SCSI anymore, so i bought a USB Scanner.
If anybody out there can still use a Mustek 6000SP, write me an email.

Update

Busy with work, university and FreeBSD. Weather not very good. Next Weekend off to Dresden for the annual Family meetup.
More Content hopefully in July when university holidays start.