Re: system goes unresponsive

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

Thanks for the response, Christos.

If I exit from top, I can't do anything that I've tried so far, which
has not included 'netstat -m'.   It's not just the network that's
broken, I can't do anything directly on the console.   It's as if I
can't start a new process (and incoming requests, for rsync for
instance, or incoming emails, fail).

--
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>

You wrote:
> 
> In article <20121217115916.3072D1E49F%body.prd.co.uk@localhost>,
> Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
> >So I thought, maybe there'se some form of attack that's causing the
> >system to run out of processes.   So last night I left top(1) running on
> >a virtual terminal.   This morning there was the same problem, but top
> >was still updating regularly and showing the system as essentially
> >100% idle, with ample free memory and swap space, and only 75
> >processes (which is about baseline for this machine).
> 
> So the machine was running and the network was broken?
> Can you break out of top and run 'netstat -m'? Or look in dmesg
> for any kernel messages, or try ifconfig your network interface down and
> up again to see if this makes it come alive again.?
> 
> christos
> 
>