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everything produces seg faults
| Posted by ainotane, 02-18-2005, 01:14 AM |
| Hello,
I'm running RH9 with APF on a dedicated server and have recently run into a strange problem.
This problem occured earlier this month. First I would ssh into the machine and run screen before doing anything else, I usually have 3-4 windows going. I can't quite remember what I did last that day but suddenly every command I run just spits out a segmentation fault message, no other messages just segmentation fault. I couldn't run ps, top, ls, less etc on the command prompt, they all just seg fault, so I couldn't even look at logs to see whats up. Actually the only two command I found to work was cd and pwd, that wasn't going to be helpful. I was also unable to ssh in again.
I got the tech guy to reboot the server for me and everything was fine again until yesterday when the same thing happened.
I got another reboot and was trying to investigate the problem today when it happened again. Now I've already used up my 2 free reboot for the month and would like to figure out what exactly is the problem before spending money on another reboot.
This time the last thing I did was ran unrar on some files and that executed successfully but every following commands just seg faults (except cd and pwd).
Now I can't ssh back in anymore but I did discover that I could still use directadmin panel that I had running there. Apache still seems to be running too but I can't access the phpbb forum domain on the machine, I'm guessing mysql craps out because I can still load php pages that doesn't use mysql (e.g. turke's mmcache info page).
Trying to reboot the machine from directadmin or restarting any services was futile, none of it worked.
However, I did find that I could view the log files from directadmin.
apache error log shows seg fault
and the last 50 lines of the system messages looked like this:
Looking at the whole log file I see an enourmous amount (1 every 1-3 seconds) of IN_TCP DROP lines and most of it with DPT=2710. Am I under attack or something? I've experienced DoS attacks before and they only slowed the server down not caused all commands to seg fault.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
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| Posted by eth00, 02-18-2005, 01:41 AM |
| What kernel version are you using, maybe try going back to a stock kernel or something different. I don't think RH9 has any more official rpm kernels that are not outdated but I have not checked recently.
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| Posted by sprintserve, 02-18-2005, 03:24 AM |
| The firewall drop messages are quite normal. But I would check:
1. Whether the server is rooted
2. Check /tmp, process list etc for suspicious.
3. Look into this error:
kernel: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000004
Try disabling Turck and see if it helps you load pages that works.
My suggestion is to order a reboot and get a good admin to work on it while you can still ssh in.
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| Posted by ainotane, 02-18-2005, 06:37 PM |
| thanks for the advice. I've gotten one of the tech guy to have a look at it and he thinks it might be hardware related. He's replaced the RAM so far to see if that will fix the problem.
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| Posted by iprone, 05-14-2008, 03:41 PM |
| ainotane...I know this is a shot in the dark and I apologize for the 3 year late response...but if you're out there and see this, could you let me know if you ever found the root cause of this issue? We've got a server with nearly identical symptoms and were hoping you may be able to shed some light on it. Thanks for your time.
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| Posted by luki, 05-14-2008, 03:55 PM |
| Most likely it's a hardware issue: bad RAM, bad power supply or dying main board.
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| Posted by iprone, 05-14-2008, 03:57 PM |
| luki...thanks, we're in the process of replacing components, with the ram already having been swapped out. We'll keep trying, I was just hoping the original poster would have had some insight at least from the standpoint of what component had failed in theirs to cause it.
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