Hi Everyone, I was wondering how often you should reboot the Raq 3. Should it be rebooted once a month, once every two months, or something?

Thanks

um...hopefully never? why would u need to reboot at a set time/date?

Well, the other day our cobalt out of nowhere stopped recieving emails. The sites were still running but something happened with the sendmail and we rebooted and everything started working again. So since we don't know how the problem happened we weren't sure if we were supposed to reboot every once in a while and make sure everything runs smoothly.

Originally posted by trunksssj
Well, the other day our cobalt out of nowhere stopped recieving emails. The sites were still running but something happened with the sendmail and we rebooted and everything started working again. So since we don't know how the problem happened we weren't sure if we were supposed to reboot every once in a while and make sure everything runs smoothly.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart
should do the trick. ;)
If not there might be another problem which *hopefully* can be taken care off without rebooting.

Sometimes the server starts failing when:

1. cpu overheat
2. running extra low on memory
3. somebody running a script causing to use up all the resources.
4. Too many sites on the server.
5. Youve got a rootkit on the server with a backdoor for someone to come in to switch off and switch on stuff.

When this does happen, always to go in and do a TOP. Check processes, process times, CPU usage, memory.

But if you bind and other stuff are written, just watch for inconsistencies.

ie: when you login through normal telnet, the biggest hint where a server is compromised is already in the log-in part.
It will show the server name in brackets....especially on a raq, if you see that, that is the first sign of trouble ahead.


When they say, reboots are not needed, I dont think so,

Cobalt does not run Windows. You don't need periodic reboots..

Having said that, there times you might need to.. Especially if your RaQ is overcrowded. No disrespect to the folks at SUN but Cobalt is not the best hardware available today ( in terms of cpu / memory etc)


*NoComment*

"Having said that, there times you might need to.. Especially if your RaQ is overcrowded. No disrespect to the folks at SUN but Cobalt is not the best hardware available today ( in terms of cpu / memory etc) "


I totally agree and not expandable too.

Thanks You All, I have one more question. What if my raq wasn't overloaded we don't have a lot of sites right now so it couldn't have been overloaded. Could an email cause the problem if it were to big or something?

It seems unlikely that a large email would knock out sendmail. However, I have had problems like this, except with the webserver suddenly dieing for no reason, and then the only fix is to start it again, there is nothing in the logs to show why it crashed.

do you have something like formmail running on the server?

just a hypothesis.................someone using your server for a large spam?>?

Even when you have not added anything to the RaQ yet, there is a considerable overhead on it. Things like Apache, PostgreSQL, the administrative interface all consume resources (I admit not so much when not used).

Keep an eye on your email log file.. When somebody is using your server to spam, you will see a lot of activity on the mail log. You will also notice that the syslogd process is using a lot of resources. Obviously these two are related. Also turn off things that you're not using (such as Chili ASP)..

*NoComment*

Well no one is running the formail script and so far there hasn't been any spam. We will keep an eye out on the log files though, we really started watching them after this incident happened.

Thanks for the help you guys