[tech] morwong

[Nick Bannon]

Sometime in the last hour or so, morwong started becoming less and
less responsive, and we were eventually forced to reboot it. CPU load
was pretty low, perhaps it was a deliberate or accidental forkbomb...
At the end, top took several minutes to start then immediately
segfaulted, "ps aux" did not complete and NIS lookups on other machines
were failing.

It's not the first time morwong's gone down - there's a pattern forming. 
Sometimes it's been power circuit issue - OK, we've done all we can
about that. The real problems have been when it's gone down for
software or hardware configuration changes, and, worse, the odd "argh,
it's all failing, must use the Windows fix method". I understand that
these things happen but it's _really_ not acceptable for our primary
NIS and NFS server.

In the couple of years mola was the NFS server I don't think it went
down as many times as morwong has.

We don't have a good alternative to slot directly into place right now,
but I think we should be looking towards picking a non-user machine to
do these jobs. It will need fast ethernet, lots of disk and preferably
a working tape drive.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal