Please Help: Services Stopping Randomly

[nhouse]

Dear Friends...

Since the day before Thanksgiving (I chalk it up to the Sober virus) I have been in PSA h-e-l-l, so to speak. First of all, be aware that I am a "learning" sys admin... and trying to learn more all of the time but I don't know enough... BIG SIGH.

Ok, I have a Virtuozzo virtual server with RH9 w/Plesk 7.5.3 and it had been working fairly smoothly for a few months now. Now, since this latest virus outbreak (which could be unrelated, I know) I have had a LOT of wierd stuff happening... here are a few instances:

> BIND has started stopping randomly, it seems to happen at times of heavy mail usage and then the Qmail que also get bloated.
> I am using 4PSA Qmail Manager... so I can easily see the amount of mail in the que. Lately, overnight when I am not watching (yea, you know) the que gets bogged down and I have had as much as 101,000 messages stuck. This morning I had around 13,000 which slowed processing down as well. Again, it seems that BIND had stopped.
> When the 101,000 que issue happened, about 2/3 of all my domains went inactive... as far as how Plesk reported them anyway (the red X icon) They stayed inactive even after a server reboot. I could in turn re-enable through Plesk and they stayed active.

Have any of you experienced similar issues lately? Or is it just my situation? I sincerely appreciate any inputs from you... thanks!!!

 

[CoKo]

That sounds a bit weird. I don't think its a problem of Plesk, but more of the VPS itself.

What is the output of "cat /proc/user_bean/counters" ?

Is there anything in the logs when the named dies? named logging is pretty good under standard circumstances.

 

[nhouse]

Thank you for the reply... I am a newbie in many ways, though I am learning a lot these days. However, that command is a real new one to me... what would it display? And speaking of logs, do you know of a good application that is reasonable priced to assist in analyzing logs? I have seen one and tested it called "Sawmill" which works pretty good... but is fairly expensive (well to me anyway).

 

[CoKo]

Originally posted by nhouse
However, that command is a real new one to me... what would it display?

This command is undocumented. It displays the actual and maximum usage and the limitations of your VPS. With that one you can see if the VPS is running out of memory, out of file descriptors, buffers, etc.

Its the first tool you should always use on a Virtuozzo VPS to analyze random problems of dying services.

Originally posted by nhouse
And speaking of logs, do you know of a good application that is reasonable priced to assist in analyzing logs? I have seen one and tested it called "Sawmill" which works pretty good... but is fairly expensive (well to me anyway).

Sorry, I've got no experiences at all with those kind of programs. As a hardcore Linux supporter, my one and only tool is "less" to browse in a fast way logs.

 

[CoKo]

Sorry about my typo. The command in question is

cat /proc/user_beancounters

Dunno where that slash was coming from...

 

[nhouse]

Hey... thanks again. I will try that and see what it shows me.