When it comes to frustrating parts of the Linux kernel, OOM killer takes the cake. If it finds that applications are using too much memory on the server, it will kill process abruptly to free up memory for the system to use. I spent much of this week wrestling with a server that was [...]
I found a server last week that was having severe issues with disk I/O to the point where most operations were taking many minutes to complete. The server wasn’t under much load, but a quick run of dmesg threw quite a bit of these lines out onto the screen:
EXT3-fs warning (device sda5): ext3_dx_add_entry: [...]
If your system abruptly loses power, or if a RAID card is beginning to fail, you might see an ominous message like this within your logs:
EXT3-fs error (device hda3) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
Basically, the system is telling you that it’s detected a filesystem/journal mismatch, and it can’t utilize the journal any longer. When [...]
I found myself wrestling with a server where the Plesk interface suddenly became unavailable without any user intervention. An attempt to start the service was less than fruitful:
[root@server ~]# service psa start
Key file: /opt/drweb/drweb32.key - Key file not found!
A path to a valid license key file does not specified.
Plesk authorization failed: HTTP request error [...]
I’ve received a lot of IM’s and e-mails from friends and readers of this blog about the Rackspace outages on November 11th and 12th. I work for a company that believes in full disclosure, so if you want the facts, they’re already available to the public:
Rackspace Information Center
TechCrunch - Quick, Plug The Internet Back [...]
