Hi all!
Yesterday iglu.org.il (so called Eskimo) stopped responding to HTTP and SSH
requests. We had to reboot it. This may have been caused due to lack of
memory. What I'd like to do is the following:
Some random thoughts:
1. I have a 4*256MB SIMMS that were donated to serve as upgrade to its memory.
I'd like to travel to Actcom and install them.
2. We'd like to configure a 2 GB swap partition. However, I need the RAID
array to back up the data on one of the 2 GB swap partitions of the SCSI
disks. However, the RAID array is currently completely inactive, and we need
to activate it. Lior, can you please step on it?
As a last-resort fall-back line before system crash - maybe consider using dynamic swap space allocators like swapd or swapspace:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/swapd
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/swapspace
(the copyright file should usually point to the upstream site. It appears that Eskimo already runs Sarge but these packages are not available there - it's about time to upgrade to Etch. I didn't find these packages in Backports).
Do you have information on what's hogging the system's memory and for what?
Possibly a more scalable and stable way to handle the problem should be to try to avoid or minimize the memory hog.
Usually when the system uses so much swap it's already crawling.
3. After we have more RAM I'd like to switch from qmail to postfix. This will
again allow us to say that we run on 100% free software.
4. Perhaps a complete upgrade of Eskimo to a more modern machine with at least
up to 64 GB of memory, as well as something faster than a 500 MHz
64GB memory is going to be expensive. As for the 500MHz it sounds indeed poor but what's the CPU utilization like right now? What does it choke on?
Pentium-III, and a bigger RAID array is in order. We can donate the old
machine to serve as a server to a school or whatever.
Or a backup server (unless it's too costly/rude to leave it on Actcom's floor... )
Thanks for taking the effort to keep this machine going.
Cheers,
--Amos
"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music"
