Subject: strange problem
To: None <netbsd-help@netbsd.org>
From: DataZap <az@datazap.net>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 08/02/2006 21:47:00
Hi,

I have a server that is still running 1.5.4 in a colo. I really need this
system to run, because it is really hard for me to setup another newer
server right now. Hopefully, I will have one soon (running NetBSD current,
of course), but I am not sure what to do in the mean time. The server
crashes every few days. Sometimes it will only have an uptime of 1 day,
but other times it will have an uptime of almost 2 weeks. One thing that
really gets me is that I run pine on this server and when I delete some
emails as soon as I type "y" to confirm the delete it crashes. It has done
this several times. I am not sure what system calls are done when pine
deletes emails, but it seems to bring down the system. I thought maybe it
could be because its is running out of file descriptors. So, I just built
and installed a kernel with almost twices as many file descriptors. I also
raised the limits on nmbclusters, maxfiles, and dfldsiz. I also built it
with support for packet forwarding, because that is supposed to raise some
kernel memory limits. I am also going to try an older version of pine
(only because I can't get a newer version to build with the packaging
system).

The other thing that I am running on this system is thttpd. It seems use
way too many file descriptors these days. I have the server restart thttpd
every hour, because that seemed to help on my other box (my other box is
running NetBSD 2.1), but on this box it seems to be going down more.

Does anyone have any ideas on why the system goes down and what I can do
to keep this from happening?

Thanks,
Al