Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:12:29 +1000 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Message-ID: <20030430185822.X15189@gamplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <851.1051650167@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <851.1051650167@critter.freebsd.dk>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > In message <20030429112849.T95090@cheesy.cypherpunks.to>, Lucky Green writes: > >One of my 5.0 test boxes is spewing these cron emails. Any idea why this > >might be? (Email addresses modified) > > /usr/libexec/save-entropy is a shell script and it pulls in /etc/rc.conf > and friends. It's probably something in there that trips it... This script is in /usr, so bad things happen if /usr is nfs-mounted and the server is down. I don't know if this is your problem, but it has the same effect of generating a lot of emails. IIRC, the main problems are that cron usually keeps running while the server is down (although cron is in /usr too, all the pages needed to run it are normally mapped) and this script is run too often (every 11 minutes). So if the server is down for (11 * N) minutes, cron forks N times and each child waits for /usr/libexec/save-entry to become accessible. Then when the server comes back up, a herd of N save-entropy's run. save-entropy is a simple shell script that has no locking, so the herd makes a mess of rotating the entropy files and sends mails about this. Bruce
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20030430185822.X15189>