Re: lot of VM problem with 2.4.23

[Ville Herva]

On Mon, Dec 22, 2003 at 05:52:01PM -0500, you [Gene Heskett] wrote:
> >
> >(It's a 7.0 Red Hat).
> >
> >It does
> >   runcmd "Sending all processes the KILL signal..."  /sbin/killall5
> > -9 before
> >   [ -n "$SWAPS" ] && runcmd "Turning off swap: " swapoff $SWAPS
> >in /etc/rc6.d/S01reboot and I've seen the "Sending all processes the
> > KILL signal..." message appear before the memory freeing loop
> > starts rolling.
> 
> If its a pristine rh7.0 install, that version of bind has a notorious 
> rootkit hole.  

Pristine - hell no. None of my install are pristine :).

Bind - hell no. I may be^W^Wam stupid, but does *anyone* put boxes in
production without disabling services first?

> So I wonder if the machine has been kitted by some 
> script kiddie whose good at covering his tracks but not the rest of 
> the housekeeping.

Uh, it may be rooted allright, but I seriously doubt that is cause of this
symptom.

> An OS upgrade does seem to be in order, lots has happened since 7.0.  

I know that, but I'm not exactly lacking interesting admin things to do so
that I would run around upgrading all the boxes there are lying around on
the corners each time a distro upgrade comes up. The box works for what it
is supposed to do (a miracle, that, considering it's a 200MHz/64MB
screamer), it's behind a fw, most services are disabled. And it's actually
being phased out of production anyway.

Sure, if I had endlessly time on my hands, I'd upgrade the distro, but right
now, I'll have to settle with just keeping the crucial services up-to-date.

> 7.3 with an updated kernel is my firewall, uptime is about 95 days 
> now. 

No problem with getting good uptimes with this kernel (2.4.21-jam1). I only
had to boot it to install the do_brk patch.

> It was shut down while I was out of state for a couple of 
> months last fall.

Longest uptimes I've got are with 2.0 and 2.2 so far. And I have a number of
RH 6.2 distros running still. I see no fundamental problem with an old
distro (as long as you know the down sides (keep the services up-to-date, no
>2GB file support with all applications etc etc).


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