[tech] morwong

[David Manchester]

> 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.

Any visible culprits yet?

> 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.

Nor our primary user box...

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

That's because it wasn't doing half the stuff morwong can and does do.

> 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.

*groan* Why are we rehashing this?
The UCC's getting to be a really frustrating environment to work with...

Tear down the machine room / don't tear down the machine room.
Don't fix the monitors/air-con, buy a new one, without even getting quotes
for repair.
Throw away the nice Alphaserver and get a happy fun PC for all the 
important things.

I've been away for four days... what has morwong been doing ?

Cheers
/dave
-- 
/ David Manchester <mustang @ ucc.asn.au> (UCC Wheel and Committee person) \
|       If Life hands you lemons today, smile and give thanks.             |
|     Then, when Life isn't looking, give him a quick knee to the groin.   |
\                              That'll learn him.                          /