From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sun May  5 16:47:15 2002
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Date: Sun, 5 May 2002 16:47:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jeff Jirsa <jjirsa@odin.ac.hmc.edu>
To: Gary Stanley <gary@outloud.org>
Cc: Patrick Thomas <root@utility.clubscholarship.com>,
	<freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: what would cause a server to behave this way ?
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On Sun, 5 May 2002, Gary Stanley wrote:

> I had that EXACT problem. I do not know the cause.
>
> 1.) Email Server
> 2.) Qpopper, Sendmail, the normal crap for a email server ;-)
> 3.) 2 times a day, or more, the server would be unresponsive.
>
> Only solution I found, was a hard reboot. I can -not- track this problem
> down, after going crazy over it, I moved my lusers back over to my
> 4.2-STABLE machine.
>

I've had the same situation. The only reason I never tried to track it
down is that it only happened on an SMP box with flaky hardware (locks
during large compiles - yet runs fine during large FTP/SCP transfers and
cpu benchmarks). The last time this occured the box was 80% idle, four
users logged in, and one popping (I know this because one of the windows I
had open was running top) - everything stopped responding, but the
connections stayed active and the syslog kept logging events until
powercycled (oddly enough, the one user was popping often enough that the
tcp connection seems to have never completely closed... her logins appear
in the logs for 20 minutes after the rest of us were sure the box had
completely frozen)...

- Jeff

==============
Jeff Jirsa
jjirsa@hmc.edu
HMC Unix Admin
==============


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