my server crashes

[disturbed]

hi there !

I've setup a fileserver at home for sharing my files with the rest of the family.
It runs gentoo for a month. since gentoo is installed the box is acting verry wierd , It crashed constantly, first I thought it was bad ram but I tested with some other ram and it did just the same. I ran top whole night and the lasted thing I saw it was processing with a load of 443(!) with the whole ram and swap full. kswapd was processing a lot.
So what could be the problem here ? A memory leak in one of the apps I run ?

I run on this box :
Lamp
vsftpd
mrtg
webmin
rsyncd
samba

I'm away for the weekend so I can't reply untill monday , sry for that.

Grtz & Thx

Disturbed
_________________
A computer is like airconditioning. When you open windows, it doesn't work.

[GordSki]

Is your box open to the internet (ie no firewall or port forwarding)?

rsyncd and ftp ports are very attractive to hackers/script kiddies.

G.

[disturbed]

[GordSki]

Is there anything in the '/var/log/message' file about kernel panics or stuff like that?

G.

[disturbed]

[GordSki]

In top you can press 'shift-m' and it'll sort by memory usage and you can see which process is using all the memory.

G.

[massheep]

how big is your swapspace and ram?

[t3rm1nal]

well, at this point could be a number of things...

a compromised box? incorrect server setups? incorrect hardware config?

need more context..

what kind of hardware are you running? if its ancient stuff, then ya, prolly gonna take a beating. i would isolate individual services and test them that way, make sure you are up to date, then go from there.

yeah and why not post up a

[disturbed]

I got a tip from a friend of mine, he told me to turn off the swap.
so I'm going to test this , maybe the swapspace is corrupted or does it have some bad blocks.
btw my server has 192Meg ram and 250Meg swap. I'm running a fileserver on a Compaq P3 600 with additional satacard with some disks , and a gigabit nic , all runned fine untill some weeks ago.
_________________
A computer is like airconditioning. When you open windows, it doesn't work.

[disturbed]

update :
My server runs for over 18 hours without crashing.
All programs are running in the ram so some programs are terminated due ram size.
so I'm sure that the swap is corrupted or has bad blocks , how do I check it ?
this doesn't work that well :

[Deathwing00]

Moved from Installing Gentoo.

[GordSki]

I've had a quick look and I can't see any tools for checking the integrity of a swap partition..... However, I did notice that you can create a swap file (swapon filename) which you might want to try.

Create your self a 250mb file on one of your other disk and use it as a swap.

G.

[disturbed]

Hey GordSki ; thx for the info , this is working great.
I think I'm going to convert the swappartition to a reiserfspartition and make the swapfile. that way I can check the partition one's in a while
I'm doing a emerge -u system and so far so good.
@Deathwing00: what has this got to do with security & networking ? this is an gentoo system issue.
_________________
A computer is like airconditioning. When you open windows, it doesn't work.

[Deathwing00]

[GordSki]

Glad it worked disturbed, but I would suggest you keep an eye on the disk you were using for the swap......

It seems very odd for it to break so much. Is it an old disk?

G.

[disturbed]