weird block of chars in access logs

[fishnyc22]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping you can shed some light on something I'm seeing in my access logs.

Let me first preface this weirdness by mentioning that I have been having problems with my FC4 Plesk 8.0.1 box with 512MB memory rebooting itself randomly thoughout the day.

I have been trying to tackle this problem for weeks and weeks without any luck. I've replaced the box, (all but the HD) and have been montoring memory. and have not been able to figure it out. I thought It might be a memory leak. but I'm not 100% on that now. I even set a cron to restart graceful httpd every 30min to release some memory. But It still rebooted randomly.

So in my logs I noticed today (I hadn't looked them in a while). that there are these weird character blocks thrown in the mix. they look like this:


^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@


They vary in size and appear randomly in todays access log. I haven't checked the old ones yet.

Does anyone know what this is all about?

Thanks a lot

Fish
><>

 

[fishnyc22]

WOW... Doing some more research it seems that the weird chars above appear in my log right before the server reboots. I only see the CHARS when viewing the log from SSH, not when downloading it locally and viewing...

Hmm... Anyone know what can cause that?

 

[fishnyc22]

Looking closer at my logs locally. I see there are broken or imcomplete lines where the @^@^@^ chars appear.

all I see

id=62019763" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

And in another spot where the chars appear I see:

5.1; en) Opera 9.00"

Think thats b/c the server is dying and failing to write or is there something else going on here?

 

[fishnyc22]

anyone? Please?