server crashes?
 

has anyone else except me noticed that the server keeps dying in the mornings (uk time, so very early for you.) EG this morning at9 am uk, it was down , and still down at like 12am.... it was down also yesterday, but came up not that long afterwards.
Is there a problem at the moment, and is there anything we can do if there is?
Stephen

Re: server crashes?
 

named keeps dying and not restarting like it should. I'm looking into it right now actually.

If you're talking about the nightly backup, I apologize. You're probably seeing it at early morning, and theres nothing we can do about that (for now) since we have a majority of the people in the US on the site we have to do it at that time.

Re: server crashes?
 

So, pretty much we're running out of memory during the database backup, and the kernel starts killing off the processes taking the most memory .. so the machine won't die. named (dns) and mysqldump (backup) are the first two that get axed, causing the backup to fail, and the machine to be floating in Internet la-la land only accessable via IP, and not 'chiefdelphi.com'.

So. Once we get a better server with more memory, we'll be ok.

Until then, I guess I'll write some sort of sanity check script to make sure named is running every 2-3 hours.

Re: server crashes?
 

hmm. if you mean the one at 5:47, i see that every day at 1047... so i don't mind that.

Maybe we should go to the donate to CD area ;)

Re: server crashes?
 

Can you add a swap file (I'm assuming it's hard if not impossible to increase the swap partition)? Obviously it will kill performance when it's needed, but if it's only used during the backup, it shouldn't be as bad having the OOM killer active.

Re: server crashes?
 

I had been wondering about that... every morning at 6-7ish for me. :)

Maybe you should fire someone to sit there and type "named" <enter> over and over again as fast as they can... :rolleyes:

Why can't you just increase the swap?

Re: server crashes?
 

Brandon,
Why not use external DNS? Also, look below for how to add SWAP ... My offer for resources still stands ;)

Joe,
Increasing the size of the SWAP partition really wouldn't be an option, but you could add SWAP space. We had to do this on a client's server that literally blewup (traffic wise).



Create the file that we're going to turn into SWAP space
Replace xxxxxx with the size of the SWAP space you'd like to add.
chmod the SWAP file for security purposes
Make is SWAP
Turn it on
Check amount of SWAP

And ... if you want it to mount on boot, add this to /etc/fstab

Re: server crashes?
 

so does mine ;)

-Mike