I had someone call me yesterday who had a seriously ill Linux server.
He said that the machine seemed heavily overloaded and was running very slowly. It would respond to its keyboard at the console, but only at the rate of one keystroke every five to ten minutes. Attempts to reach it with ssh from another system were timing out with "connection reset by peer". control-alt-delete wasn't having any affect (the command may have been removed for security).
He wound up hitting the reset button, and now has hard disk errors that e3fsck can't handle. Quite a mess. It's possible that he could have logged in and issued commands (if he'd kept at it all night), but the slowdown appeared to be worsening.
What he hoped I could tell him was whether there was any way to get the kernel's attention under these circumstances. The problem might have been fixed by deleting an oversize /tmp file or killing some processes, if there was a way to get in. I don't know of any.
Is there a better way to handle this problem, other than "Don't let it happen to begin with"?
Thanks,
Scott C.
_______________________________________________ TriLUG mailing list http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ: http://www.trilug.org/~lovelace/faq/TriLUG-faq.html
