From: Irene A. Shilikhina (irene@alpha.iae.nsk.su)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 06:42:02 EDT
I did not ask any question but my information might possibly be useful
for somebody else, so here it is.
Since the late December, a 4.0D system of ours started crashing regularly,
though not the same time but inevitably at weekend, when the system load
was lowest, by the same crash reason ("kernel memory fault"), in the same
current process ("kernel idle" !?!), and with the same stack, including
registers contents. I should note that until then, after upgrading from
3.2c, the system demonstrated a high stability.
We have neither service contract nor opportunity to upgrade further, so I
had to do my best trying to sort it out, if at all possible, on my own.
At first I cleaned it out - to no avail. Then I tried turning off all the
services, one by one, until my suspicion felt on portmap. I made sure when
the system was up for three weeks with portmap daemon turned off for
weekends.
Then I changed the native portmap with so called secure portmap by Wietse
Venema and denied portmap access from other domains. Well, touch wood
seems to have done... for the whole month the system is behaving itself...
Thanks, Wietse! Well done. Though invented a decade ago it remains useful
and reliable. The TCP-wrapper I've used for years, and now it comes to
portmap.
Irene
P.S. Yes, there were long, long, ... long experiments.
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* *
* Irene A. Shilikhina e-mail: irene@alpha.iae.nsk.su *
* System administrator, *
* Institute of Automation & Electrometry, *
* Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, *
* Novosibirsk, Russia *
* http://www.iae.nsk.su/~irene *
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* *
* The road to hell is paved with good intentions. *
* *
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