I don't understand most of these posts where people have been haing massive server problems. I have 2 computer and 2 servers and none of them have ever crashed. The servers I have had for over 2-3 years and i've never had anything crash on them. I see everyday someonetalking about a piece of hardware on their dedicated server from xxx crashing. Is it because they are using cheap products or what. I understand when you have as many servers as some of these companies do, you will hardware failures. But this seems also disproportionate to the number of users they have. Maybe someone can answer this for me.

yep, cheap components if surely one reason.
the best thing a dedicated server provider can do is:
buy some parts, put a testserver together, run some tests, and if everything fits well, buy the same components in large chunks.
though every single server should run through a "burn-in-test" again, before beeing sold to a costumer.
that would be the perfect way! but that's also a question of staff, money and time!

best regards,

btw. my server is running very smooth, just broke the 200days uptime :)

Some of it's related to cheap hardware. And, then some of it's related to people not knowing how to manage a server, and thinking/blaming it on hardware.

yup yup a minimum 48 hour burn in test is required.

and yup yup once more. There are ALOT of people out there with a dedicated server who screw it up by themselves and then we network people get the blame.

ie. guy with server messes up his httpd.conf file. Calls in and says his server is not working and blames us for connectivity. We check on the problem and have it fixed, and in no time he blames us for his 20 mins of downtime saying his server is configured wrongly, but in fact we knew that he messed with the httpd.conf file and deleted something through the date of the file and the connection logs.

And did we charge him? No, our billing department plays god and reads each report before billing and in this case, the client was never billed.

but messing up with httpd.conf shouldn't crash the server it should only crash the apache or make it unstable !!

just my $0.02

Also, I guess server crashing have something to do with ECC RAM. I guess most of companies don't use ECC RAM in servers which might be one of the cause of crashing server.

what do you think?

newbs have a different definition of "crashed" -- remember.

Yeah, I've had people tell me there hard drive crashed, and nothing is wrong with it.

It also depends on the OS you are running.
If Linux, the distro too.

ECC RAM just reduces the likelihood data in the RAM will corrupt, which can cause an OS to get in a twist and crash. I wouldn't say ECC RAM is necessary for anything except mission-critical life/death servers.

By the way... ECC RAM just has a parity bit for data integrity, forgot to say that. Bit like RAID 1, but doesn't mirror.

It also depends on luck as well, it only takes one determined competitor and you can go from having 6 months uptime to crashing every day.

If you want to see what i mean just give me the url to your server and permission to try and crash it :)

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
It also depends on luck as well, it only takes one determined competitor and you can go from having 6 months uptime to crashing every day.

If you want to see what i mean just give me the url to your server and permission to try and crash it :)

If a server is set up properly, this scenario is unlikely. PM me and I'll let you have a shot at my server, as I'd really like to see this. You can launch a Dos attack, like anyone else, sure, but did you have other plans that you think would actually crash a server? PM me and let me know.

I'll back Alan up in saying it can be done fairly easily.

I hope your kidding, Robert. Whether someone could or couldn't crash your server, I wouldn't ever give someone permission to just TRY.

having an account on the server will of course make it easier todo, if you have resellers they sometimes create accounts with very easy to guess usernames and passwords which makes it easy for someone to cause havoc.

If you want to give me a pm with a username and password for an account on your server ill see what i can do.

Whatever you guys are doing, i hope you're not doing it on a live server with customers on it.

Thats up to him if he wants to let me try on one of his production servers.


Whether someone could or couldn't crash your server, I wouldn't ever give someone permission to just TRY

I wouldnt do anything that couldnt be fixed by a reboot.

Also, I guess server crashing have something to do with ECC RAM.

I may be entirely wrong, but I believe that... ECC detects errors, but can't fix them -- your computer crashes, but in many cases, this is preferred over having your computer chug along with corrupt data in RAM.

It's been a while since I did much with RAM, can anyone tell me if I'm right or not?

Originally posted by smidwap
I hope your kidding, Robert. Whether someone could or couldn't crash your server, I wouldn't ever give someone permission to just TRY.

Consider that I'm confident that someone can't (barring any obvious attacks that are just going to tie up ports or DoS the system). I've not got any clients on it yet anyway, so allowing him to try isn't an issue. He's a regular here and I am sure he's not going to try when I ask him to not try anymore. I don't think it'll be an issue, so I figure what better time to have him try. I don't think crashing a server is as easy as he stated (provided a server is configured reasonably well).

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
having an account on the server will of course make it easier todo, if you have resellers they sometimes create accounts with very easy to guess usernames and passwords which makes it easy for someone to cause havoc.

If you want to give me a pm with a username and password for an account on your server ill see what i can do.

Having an account to do stuff is a different matter. You speak of resellers, so I assume you're speaking in regards to some type of specific system set up on the server? I'm not running any of the popular control panels, if that's what you're getting at, as I'm developing my own. I'm not sure what weak passwords have to do with this scenario, as I'd then have to set up an account for you to log into anyway.

Anyway, I think I'd be up for this nonetheless, and you said that it's "easier" with an account. This is certainly true. So, are you saying you can't do this without an account? With an account, I have limits to control the resources, so I'm not concerned about that, in addition to how I've configured the server. I can create an account and see what you can do. I'll PM you in a little while (probably later today).

Well i do need an account on the server to crash it, other than doing a dos of course. I look forward to your pm :)

At least one of will learn something from this..

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
Well i do need an account on the server to crash it, other than doing a dos of course. I look forward to your pm :)

At least one of will learn something from this..

Of course I can't give permission for any network type of attacks, being it's not my network. I already expect you'd not do such a thing anyway.

For any viewers interest, for the sake of clarity, this isn't an open challenge to everyone to try and attack or compromise the server.

Anyway, it sounds fun, I'll PM you today and get in contact with you to get you the login information of an account. Let me know what type of access you expect to have to pull off whatever it is you want to try. Does this involve only certain types, such as FTP or do you expect you'll need shell access as well? Is there anything else you'll need to tell me to get it ready for you? How long will you need?

We'll take this into PM actually, and you can just post here and let people know if you were able to cause any problems or crash the server or not, after you try.

Woohoo! This sounds fun. ;)

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
I wouldnt do anything that couldnt be fixed by a reboot.

The filesystem may become corrupted with any unclean shutdown.

and? its not a production server...